Next year in 2022, when India celebrates the 75th anniversary of its independence, just after this devastating pandemic, our major challenge will be employment generation and bringing the economy back on track. After experiencing this most crucial phase of our time, we must learn a lesson. And that is, if we want better governance, healthcare system, and better delivery of civic services to our people, then India must embrace the Technology at much faster level. Emphasis should be on 5G touching the lives of rural and weaker economic segments and generate employment to make it a truly inclusive technology.
By Dr. Jyotsna PANDIT
As India is passing through the ugliest phase of utter chaos, confusion and complete collapse of our healthcare system, during this unprecedented time of cruel Covid pandemic, the only ray of hope remains for the future is the maximum and faster use of technology.
Since over the last one year we all are facing lockdowns sometimes nationwide or now area wise, and have already adopted the culture of WFH (work from home) and even the men of our society have also largely compelled to join BJP (Bartan Jhadu Pochha) replacing our lovely Kaamwaalis, the technology has also altered and infiltrated every walk of our lives, thankfully, becoming our partner and saviours in many ways.
Now the question is how long these technological changes will last in our lives? Technology firms are already betting on a permanent trend. They are rapidly adjusting to a post-COVID world where people will do more from home—buying, learning, working, and socializing—and avoid interacting with the physical world whenever possible, with so-called touchless technologies.
A new virtual world is emerging. And this will be accelerated after the full implementation of 5G technology in our country, which has the potential of ushering a major societal transformation in India by enabling rapid expansion of the role of information technology across manufacturing, educational, healthcare, agricultural, financial & social sectors.
The next industrial revolution is already extremely active. Artificial intelligence (AI) is accompanying an era of technologies that are quicker, more adaptable, more productive, and making one and all more digitally connected across the globe. Artificial Intelligence has evolved since the late 1950s, but recently it has gained too much popularity. The credit of all this goes to- the vast amounts of data being collected by the sensors, satellites and internet. Also the development of more powerful and faster computers, availability of open source software and data and increase in abundant, nominal and cheap storage have added to its credit its popularity.
AI is capable of quickly perceiving the patterns which human beings cannot, make prognosis more efficiently and endorse better policies and solutions to a variety of problems which are being faced by the human race in their day to day activities. The holy grail of artificial intelligence research is artificial general intelligence, through which computers will be able to reason, summarise, understand, implement and communicate like human beings such as predicting solutions to various genuine problems, recognizing speech or images and forecasting weather. As AI becomes one of society’s greatest assets, it’s especially helpful for tackling the problems that seems larger than life — like protecting our natural environment,
Sustainable growth of the entire world depends on various factors such as economy, quality education, medical assistance, agriculture, industries and many others, but it is observed that eventually the environment is one of the most sought out factors that plays the most significant role amongst them. Safety, Health and Hygiene are the key constituents of the sustainability of mankind and progress of any community or the country, which comes from a clean, pollution free and hazardous free environment.
Thus, the monitoring of the environment becomes an unavoidable aspect so as to ensure that the citizens of any nation can lead a healthy and happy life. Environment monitoring or what we call EM in short, consists of proper planning and management of innumerable disasters, controlling different types of pollution and effectively addressing the provocations that arise due to unhealthy external factors. EM deals with different types of calamities such as water pollution, air pollution, hazardous radiation, weather changes, earthquakes, cyclones, landslides etc. It is seen that the sources of pollution are contributed by several factors, some of which are human-made and others due to the natural causes, and the role of EM is exactly to address the challenges so that the environment is protected for a healthy society across the world.
With the more updated advances in the field of science and technology, especially in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), EM has become a smart environment monitoring (SEM) system, because the technology has enabled EM methods to observe and monitor the various factors influencing our environment more precisely, with an optimal and best control of pollution and other undesirable effects. Now-a-days the design of smart cities is taking the place of old and traditional methods to formulate and plan urban environments. Smart cities are planned using wireless networks that help in monitoring of the pollution level produced by the vehicles in any city.