Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has highlighted his country’s role in adopting technology in response to the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying Australia has been a great adapter and implementer of technology.
Noting that during the initial phase of the pandemic, Australian companies changed the way they functioned, with many modifying their online presence to continue their business. “We have faced the COVID-19 challenges head on and have accelerated adoption of technology by keeping the businesses running. There was a very strong uptake of technology as a direct response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Morrison remarked during the inauguration of the Bengaluru Tech Summit on Thursday.
India and Australia shared common values, he said, adding that Indian companies like Infosys already had a footprint in Australia while Australian companies had a presence in the IT city of Bengaluru. He highlighted the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund (AISRF) and how it had given grants to different institutions. Morrison also recalled his virtual meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi this year and said that both the countries had a great future working together on different technology areas. He also mentioned the soon to be launched Australia-India Cyber and Critical Technology Partnership Grant and said it would further cement the ties between the two countries.
Later, during his keynote address at the Bengaluru Tech Summit, Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra said the pandemic had resulted in the pooling of skill, knowledge and integration of technology. He said that the crisis can speed up the technology adoption and can help in bringing about the societal transformation required for a post COVID-19 world.
The Mahindra Group has invested more than Rs 1,000 crores in Karnataka, he said, emphasizing the need for industry to identify technologies that have a beneficial impact for the poor and the disadvantaged. He also stressed on the importance of integration of technology and how it can bring in changes. “Innovation should attract investment,” he said.
He recalled the Indian invention of Simputer, a handheld personal computer released in 2002 that promised to bring computing to the masses. Mahindra called it a radical innovation that foreshadowed technologies later used by the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy. However the Indian innovation failed because we were too risk averse to investment in manufacture and scale, he observed.
