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The pandemic has exposed the country’s access problem, and this could be solved by technology, said N Chandrasekaran, Chairman of Tata Sons, the holding company of Tata Group.

Vaccines must be mass-produced, by replicating factory capacities, he added.

Speaking at the 6th National Management Conclave of the All India Management Association (AIMA), on Tuesday, Chandrasekaran said that if there was a single online platform with all the information on availability of hospital beds, vaccines, oxygen, etc., people will know where to access them.

“The best thing we can do immediately is to have predictive analytics to know where the cases will rise next,” he said.

Platform approach

Chandrasekaran said that India’s two biggest problems were access to resources and jobs, and technology could solve both the problems. He said that India needed a platform approach to digital solutions. It was hard to be an entrepreneur when one had to deal with forms, licences, taxes, payroll, finance — everything except doing the business that one wants. A digital platform could take over all these tasks and free the entrepreneur to do what he does best, he said. Having an SME platform would create industrial clusters everywhere and that is how India would create the 100 million jobs that it needs.

Predicting the trends for the next 10 years, Chandrasekaran said that there will be a great acceleration of digitalisation in every business and the public health will receive a lot more attention and investment. He expected the sustainability issue to gather momentum and the world coming together on that. He also sees supply chains shifting from ‘just-in-time’ to ‘just-in-case’, albeit those will continue to be globally integrated.

Speaking at the same virtual conclave but at a different session, Sanjay Puri, CMD, ITC, said the lessons of last year will come in handy, as organisations’ resilience and agility have been stress-tested and tuned for disruption.

Puri said that ITC had pivoted to a more agile architecture and was better prepared with supply chains and inventories built in anticipation of potential disruption.

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