How can India benefit from the current shifts in demand and economic parameters?
Interventions by the Indian government in the following subjects may help benefit the business amid Coronavirus:
- Telemedicine and e-medical tourism: While an immediate intervention to boost the sector may help the current or upcoming demand of consultation with a doctor in India, the abundance may then be granted as an opportunity to open it worldwide and capitalize on the expertise of Indian doctors. According to a report by IBEF, The Indian healthcare sector was expected to grow at a CAGR of 22% during 2016-2022 and reach $372B in 2022 from US$ 110 billion in 2016.
- Drone licensing: Quick process of drone licensing may not only benefit the rise of the sector of delivery via drones but also may invite Private Equity from around the world for tech innovation. According to a report, FICCI and EY projected the value of the Indian UAV (Unmanned aerial vehicle) market to be around $885.7M, while the global market size to go around $21.47B by the year 2021.
- IT Products: The supply chain analytics to cope up with the irregular curves of demand and supply may ask for advanced IT algorithms and solutions in the form of products. Apart from that, IT products presented the solution for the case of remote working and online education.
- Social Commerce: With the rise in the usage of social media amid coronavirus along with the adoption of e-commerce, social commerce has already been reported as a $70B opportunity for India. With a steady growth of social media users globally, which is further expected to rise in the coming years coupled with the fact that 71% of consumers rely on social media for their buying decisions, while 78% of people get influenced by the social media posts of companies for their buying decisions. (Ref: Forbes)
- Digital Lending: The crunch of funds due to irregularities of the global order and the supply chain presents the opportunity for pushing the funds via digital platforms, enabling different blue-collar small investors to lend their money via peer-to-peer measures and to swiftly enable the penetration of funds into the economy. Digital Lending is a $1 Trillion-dollar opportunity for India over the next five years according to The Boston Consulting Group. It is estimated that by the year 2023, the digital influence on retail lending could grow to reach 70-75 percent of consumers.
- Digital Payments: With paper currency being a carrier of microparticles, the adoption of digital mode of payments can be easily accepted via government channels of mass awareness and propagation of specific measures in the form of advisory.
- InsurTech: While the fear of ensuring the right and orderly treatment from diseases without drilling one’s pocket makes the case for Insurance companies to make a swift action in the current scenario, technology intervention may further support the cause by deliberating an easy channel. The emergence of fully digital insurance companies can be noticed in the current scenario.
- IT service delivery: The shift of offline to online platforms presents the case of effective delivery of a huge bank of IT human resources and knowledge in the Indian subcontinent. According to a report by the consulting firm Zinnov, India will account for 41% of the digital engineering services market by the year 2025 and account for $10.6 billion of the digital engineering market share, which, on the other hand, is expected to grow 4X in the next five years, as reported by LiveMint.
- The gig economy and utilization of Indian IT professional services: With 15M+ people working independently in various sectors such as IT, finance, sales and marketing, designing, animation, videography, content and academic writing and being the world’s largest freelance workforce after the USA, coupled with comparatively lower hourly rates, India hosts a huge potential of its IT workforce, according to the Freelancer India survey report by Truelancer. According to the same report, online marketplaces source the highest jobs for the stated force of freelancers.