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Business News/ Industry / Infotech/  EmTech India 2016: The digital future
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EmTech India 2016: The digital future

Edited excerpts from speeches and discussions at EmTech India 2016, organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review

Jack Hidary, a senior adviser at Google X Labs and also founder and chairman of US-based Samba Energy, speaking at EmTech India 2016 in New Delhi. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/MintPremium
Jack Hidary, a senior adviser at Google X Labs and also founder and chairman of US-based Samba Energy, speaking at EmTech India 2016 in New Delhi. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint

Global technology leaders and senior executives from around the world spoke on a range of topics, including Digital India, Smart Cities, Make in India, Skill India and cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D printing, drones, robotics, robotic surgeries and genomics, at the two-day EmTech India 2016 event, held in New Delhi on 18 and 19 March. The event was organized by Mint and MIT Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The speakers included Jack Hidary, senior adviser at Google X Labs; Bhaskar Pramanik, chairman of Microsoft India; and Sharad Sharma, co-founder of think tank iSPIRT. The full list can be accessed at emtech.livemint.com/speakers. Here are edited excerpts from their speeches.

Over the next decade, 50% of all transactions in India will be digital: Jack Hidary

Hidary is a senior adviser at Google X Labs and also founder and chairman of US-based Samba Energy, a marketplace for commercial solar projects and financing.
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Hidary is a senior adviser at Google X Labs and also founder and chairman of US-based Samba Energy, a marketplace for commercial solar projects and financing.

A moonshot is an initiative that accompanies a goal that was previously thought to be near impossible. Moonshot philosophy sounds like it is quite radical and risky, but actually it is low-risk. That is because it attracts the best human capital and finance.

Moonshot approaches do a few things. First, they attract the best human capital, which is a key driver of growth. They attract the best financial capital as well; capital from big and long-term thinkers.

One describes India as a moonshot nation. India itself is going through a radical transformation—the likes of what we have never seen.

This is very different to what is happening in China or any other country in the world. It is a combination of smartphones, digital payments, broadband and power of energy storage coming together.

Smartphones ease the access to the Internet and open up users to mobile apps and that really changes the name of the game. We asked industry experts about what they think will be the smartphone penetration in India this year. They said 26% of the phones in India are smartphones, which will rise to 40% by 2019.

Prices of smartphones are coming down dramatically. It took 10 years for India to reach 350 million smartphones, but it will take only five more years to get to the next 300 million, owing to cheaper phones and the network pull effect.

With 650 million smartphones in India, imagine Flipkart, Snapdeal, and imagine all the new services—it will change commerce, payments and e-governance.

Uber and Ola together are changing transportation in India right now. In India, access to e-commerce from mobile is No. 1 in the world—with digital payments, India has opportunity again for e-commerce. Over the next 10 years, I believe, 50% of all transactions in India will be digital.

We in the West started building infrastructure 100-200 years ago and in the process we have made many mistakes. India has an opportunity to surpass us in the area of energy storage. In healthcare, it is the same.

Rather than thinking about one centralized system, it should look at a decentralized approach—a system that is truly resilient.

We are seeing a great beginning in India with Ola, Uber and digital payment solutions. This is an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the West—and scale up decentralized systems.

How can this moonshot be done? The first thing is to think of a very important problem. Too often I see entrepreneurs and investors investing in start-ups that solve a trivial problem—and not grand challenges.

I can tell from working with moonshots over the last 15 years that these initiatives not only solve problems, they yield multi-billion dollar companies.

If you want that moonshot of yours to be the true engine for change, attract attention, and the best human and financial capital in a way that you have never seen before to tackle climate change, longevity, housing for all, food distribution, planetary colonization, access to clean water, healthcare, clean and affordable energy and the Internet.

Think about the scale you need to serve 200 million people, then 500 million people. For that, you will need new kinds of solutions, scalable solutions and lastly, don’t be afraid to include some of the steps that are not possible today. Think big.

So, in a nutshell, in India, a lot of factors are coming together to make it a moonshot economy—mobile Internet, payments, entrepreneurial activity and investments.

You also have a government that understands where it needs to go to in the future. This is the model that India needs to leapfrog the West—and you don’t have to make our mistakes.

—Transcribed by Moulishree Srivastava

Mobile cash will become all-pervasive within a year: Sharad Sharma

Sharad Sharma is the co-founder of iSPIRT, a Bengaluru-based think tank for tech start-ups. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint
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Sharad Sharma is the co-founder of iSPIRT, a Bengaluru-based think tank for tech start-ups. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint

India is entering a phase of innovation that is substantially different from what we have seen until now. And it is based on an idea that is seven years old.

The idea is that if you have enough building blocks available for people, then small teams will build complex systems.

For instance, for cab-hailing services Uber and Ola, if you take out any of the three things—smartphones, GPS and Google Maps—there will be no Uber or Ola.

In fact, these three things were not created for Uber or Ola. When they were created, nobody knew there would be Uber or Ola at one point of time. What they did was, they allowed many companies to build complex systems, with very little effort and disrupt industries altogether.

In India, this is what is starting to happen. This change that we are talking about is a journey of a group of people, most of them from Bangalore, just deciding among themselves that we will build something that is on a country scale and give it away for public goods movement to become stronger.

It started with something that all the people have—Aadhaar. Aadhaar is going to reach 1 billion by the end of this month. It is an incredible success story. And what makes it incredible is it actually underpins a stack. Aadhaar, at the bottom of the stack, constitutes the presence-less layer, which means I can open a bank account and establish who I am without doing in-person verification.

The second layer is a paper-less layer. India today has less than a million people with an e-sign, which allows a person to lock a document and verify that he is the person who locked it. India will have eight million people using e-sign by the end of this year, not having to use a dongle, but essentially using Aadhaar to make that happen.

The layer on top of that is the payments layer. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched in February and its business launch will take place in April in Mumbai. It is built on payments that we have. For example, if you go to Wal-Mart in the US and pay by credit card and the moment you come out, you are hit by a car. Yet, the credit card company still has to pay on your behalf to Wal-Mart.

But suppose I pay by debit card, before I come out of Wal-Mart, my bank account had been debited and yet Visa and MasterCard change 1% or more to make this happen, because they have a monopoly and that old method of settling accounts is very pervasive—thus new players are not able to come in.

So, in 2009, a group of people in Bangalore said this Visa, MasterCard tax is very bad—let us build a switch to solve this problem. It was unimaginatively called IMPS (immediate payment switch). It went on to become successful, and today many times more money flows through IMPS in India than MasterCard and Visa.

India is the only country in the world that without using protectionism defeated the old way (or the card way) of going cashless. Other countries like China banned MasterCard and Visa to stop their monopoly.

UPI makes this facility available for you on your mobile phones. Before a year from now, mobile cash will become all-pervasive. That is because of the fourth layer, which is going to be launched in May-June. It is called the consent layer.

We are data poor right now, but we are putting in place a new system to managing digital consent, so nobody can aggregate data about you without a digital permission token from you. This is going to be the largest country-scale system in the world—a techno-legal solution.

The US, till recently, had not even focused on legal privacy. India is taking a very modern approach which is a techno-legal sort of solution to manage privacy. Built on the top of the stack are applications that we are going to build.

—Transcribed by Moulishree Srivastava

Digital disruption has impacted millions of people: Bhaskar Pramanik

Bhaskar Pramanik is the chairman of Microsoft India. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint
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Bhaskar Pramanik is the chairman of Microsoft India. Photo: Ramesh Pathania/Mint

Our mission as a company is to empower every individual and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

In the last few weeks, I have been travelling around different cities in India. One of the biggest themes for most chief executive officers is what can they do to transform business and become more digital?

Most of them are doing five things, which show that they are really transforming their businesses.

The first is, most of them are looking how they can build intelligent, connected products and services. Second, they are looking how they can provide differentiated customer experience. Third is focused around how they can use Internet of Things for manufacturing. Fourth, how can they improve efficiency of their processes using analytics, and finally, most of them are looking how analytics can help them not just take better decision today, but also to be able to predict the future.

But this disruption is not really just for big businesses, but also for micro and small enterprises.

Last week, I had the opportunity to be in Bangalore and meet with a number of ISVs ( independent software vendor) and born-in-the-cloud system integrators, and the kind of work doing for businesses, whether small or large, is really impressive. The most important thing is this disruption is not just touching and helping companies transform themselves, but touching the lives of millions of people.

This disruption actually impacts our lives. Very clearly, our infrastructure from network perspective is improving, whether it is 2G, 3G or 4G, we are getting more widespread in terms of coverage.

I was at Reliance Jio last week, and they gave me a demonstration on how they can get 100 mbps on mobile. The second thing that gives me the confidence is that we are a tech-savvy nation. And it does not matter whether it is somebody in school or my grandmother. The other thing which gives me a lot of confidence is the ISV and the start-up ecosystem. I am really enthused about how they use technology.

The last and the most important thing is that we have a government that is leveraging technology for public good, whether it is education, financial inclusion, health or skilling. I believe e-gov is going to be the next killer app.

So, what you are going to see on you mobile phones is a lot more applications which enable you to get something done or get the government to listen to you.

—Transcribed by Moulishree Srivastava

3D printing is now taught in schools: Swapnil Sansare

Do you know that India has about 60,000 3D printers? My father used to make ship models but there was no 3D printing back then. The first 3D printer (3D printing refers to various processes used to synthesize a three-dimensional object. In 3D printing, successive layers of material are formed under computer control to create an object) was made almost 32 years back. A few years later some companies launched 3D printers, but they were super-expensive. 3D printing created waves all around the world. We are now making pasta, cakes, and are doing lot of surgeries with 3D printing. Recently, NASA introduced a 3D printer that prints their spares, components and tools in space.

India, though, is yet to catch up. In terms of the education sector, for instance, 3D printing is something that can be taught to children. They can conceive their ideas and turn them into reality. For example, there is this institute in Pune called Vigyan Ashram, where the teachers are going to rural areas and teaching children about 3D printing and how to use 3D printers. We are working with them.

The Indian Army also uses 3D printing for terrain mapping. With 3D printing you can directly take digital files out of Google Earth and convert them into terrain data. This can be used for war planning and mapping. They are also using it for creating prototypes of a grenade launcher and different arms and ammunitions to train new cadets. In terms of medical equipment, there is even a company which prints liver tissues and the plan is to 3D print a complete liver by 2020. 3D printing is a way of distributed manufacturing. The way manufacturing is happening now is going to change. The world’s best cab company does not own cabs, the world’s best hotel company does not own hotels—perhaps, the world’s best product company may not own machines in the future. You may simply share the design with your consumers who, in turn, can print it at their desks. 3D printing is going to change the way manufacturing is done, the way we look at customized products, and the way we look at products for individuals.

The author is co-founder and CEO of Divide by Zero Technologies.

—Transcribed by Shine Jacob

Drones increase our reach: Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy

We build drone-based solutions for large industries. We enable these industries to use drones in the most effective manner. Drones are being used for various military applications and also for wedding photography. A drone is actually a robot which can move in three dimensions. What makes it useful? It becomes useful simply because it can carry something called a payload, which can capture and deliver data. Beyond that, it brings reach.

As a human, the geographical influence that I have is about 5 metres. But with a drone, I am simply empowered to travel about 30 kilometres. With this you can collect data and can even start delivering stuff 30 kilometres away. It enables productivity. Suppose, I am a company collecting land survey data--it takes lots of manpower to do it. About 200 acres takes roughly about two weeks for four people to collect all the data with the technology that we have right now. But for a drone, it’s easy to cover eight to 10 acres a minute and 200 acres in an hour. It can provide security to a vast area of land.

We did some case studies. The first one I am going to talk about is mining. It’s actually an industry with very limited reach, no security and limited productivity. If we want to collect data of a topography, we will have to stop operations. In our case study, we could actually collect data at about 8 acres a minute. The number of people involved to collect data is just one person. Slope maps can provide data on areas that could get waterlogged if it rains. Thus they enable better mine planning.

Another case study that we did is on corridor mapping. There are about 100,000 kilometres of Indian highways. We have not digitized them. Every time, we have to survey that land if we have to put an extra lane. We can cover 100,000 kilometres of land with about 3,000 drone hours.

Another innovative application that we are working on with a client is rooftop solar panels. Drones can install the panels with maximum accuracy so that satellites can capture the data. Drone applications are now entering into every market--infrastructure, security and utility. Drones also reduce our carbon footprint.

The author is co-founder of Skylark Drones.

What does our DNA say: Anu Acharya

Personalised medicine is about a very unique you. We at MapMyGenome provide a solution for disease prevention. Lifestyle diseases are going to grow 80% by 2020. We have 87 million diabetics projected in India by 2020 and there is also a very clear path towards 100 million. Now that is not where we want to be as a country. Also look at the instances of breast cancer in India. They can be treated if detected early but most Indians get to the doctor when it’s too late.

So the future of healthcare is going to be personalized, predictive and participatory, which means individuals will be able to generate data and create the big data that will ultimately help them—a sort of genetic screen for prevention and disease reduction.

To create that paradigm shift, we will need a lot of data. It will improve the accuracy of the findings.

In our case, we are taking a little swab and we look at four different things.

The questions we ponder on are—why is it that some of us are more obese; why is it that some of us are likely to have cholesterol; why is it that some of us are likely to like certain food?

Then there are things like inherited conditions. It means if an individual is a carrier of thalassemia, it is alright to be a carrier. But if you are marrying someone or having a baby with someone with the same mutation, you are likely to pass it on to the next generation. Now when you think about it from the Indian context, we have the whole gotra (Sanskrit for the word ‘clan’) selection, which essentially ensures that you do not pass on the same mutation. But somewhere down the line, we did lose that.

One out of six people in this world is an Indian. But the data available for the Indian genome is much smaller than that which can be found for other countries. Also the Indian genome is very complicated. Only about two-three months ago we found that there were five different kinds of ancestry. It means that most of the data that we have about our ancestors is perhaps inaccurate because we always thought of the Indian population as comprising of ancestral north Indians or ancestral south Indians. But now we have the Tibetan Burmese, the Andamanese and so on.

There was also this great paper in the magazine Nature which came out in 2015 and showed a correlation between Ayurveda and genomic studies. So our vision at MapMyGenome is to be able to say that we can create a personalized and predictive solution for 100 million consumers and be able to build a knowledge repository of 10 million Indian samples.

We do not recommend medication. We recommend specific foods—things like what users need to avoid and other exercises. If need be, we ask users to consult doctors.

When it comes to privacy, we take data confidentiality very seriously. What we are trying to study is more an overall population and if people come to us, we do not share specific people information regardless of who they are. It is the consumers who own their genetic data.

The author is chief executive officer of MapMyGenome.

If you look at every industrial revolution of the past, they have not cut jobs: Marc Carrel Billiard

Accenture Plc, which has been into applied research for more than two decades, delivers a ‘technology vision’ every year—it constitutes technology trends that it believes are going to be disruptive for clients. According to Marc Carrel Billiard, managing director of Global Technology Research and Development at Accenture, it was in 2013 that Accenture first spoke about digital transformation in its technology vision. It saw organizations developing their thinking about digital transformation. In 2014, organizations were embracing cloud, social media and new platforms like Internet of Things; and were moving from being digitally disruptive to being digital disruptors. In 2015, while organizations went through digital transformation within, it was all about being able to strike partnerships with companies across industry verticals, so as to start disrupting the market.

According to Billiard, this year it is all about people. In a conversation with Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review, at EmTech India 2016, Billiard said technology is changing so fast that organizations are finding themselves in a digital cultural shock.

Edited excerpts:

How do you address fears that artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics are coming for our jobs?

It is a concern that I can very well understand. One thing we studied, if you look at every industrial revolution of the past, they have not cut jobs. What they did was eventually retrained people, and they created more opportunities than the jobs they took away. What is also very important to understand is that not everyone will be able to go and work on this, but a vast number of people will be retrained. For example, there is a university in Texas and they have been using bots to teach mathematics to students. And everybody said if we let bots teach mathematics to kids, what’s in store for the teacher, the guy who does not teach anymore? That’s wrong, because that guy will still be teaching; and through the bots, he will be able to get a lot more data which can be used to tune up the training curriculum. And they (teachers) get more interested in this job than training all the time. And there is a direct impact on performance. In just one year, we saw 20% more students completing the training. I really believe there is a future in automation. I think we need to retrain our people and we need to alleviate these fears.

How does Accenture as a accompany address this? How do you walk the talk about your own human capital?

One thing that we are doing is putting in place a training platform. This is something very important. We do believe, Accenture is a very unique company, because people there are trained to learn very quickly. To be consultants, we need to be agile and stay ahead of our clients in terms of knowing things. This is a very multi-controller organization. So what we try to do is listen to them. We give them the platform they need. Performance management is also going to change, so that our people can do the job they like, and not the job they are forced to do. Because probably, the job that one is forced to do, someone else among our people would love to do. So this is the thing that we are going to be doing more and more going forward.

Are we ready yet to think about digital devices and our cars and other digital systems having the kind of autonomy where they can take decisions on our behalf? If not, how do you build trust in digital devices and systems?

I don’t believe we are ready yet. And technology is not yet there. I think we have been talking about just simple automation that just scares off people and eventually people are not going to feel good about it. I think we are talking about the next level and beyond that. So we are not there yet, but I know we are working on this. There have been training (courses) being set up in some major universities related to this. The thing is digital ethics is going to be very interesting. There is one thing that you can do which is related to technology is to put secure in the design of what you do. And you need to be a forward thinker about this. Approach like design thinking in what you are doing to introduce something of thinking beyond what you think. For instance, thinking about a catastrophe, what could happen and how you are going to prevent it—all these things need to be ingrained in the way you are going to be designing your product. I have talked about security measures you need to put in data, we are in the middle of it. If you think about Apple discussing with FBI about this whole topic right now, Apple is clearly standing up because they have to save their company. They need to speak up on behalf of their clients. If they breach iPhones, what would become of confidentiality within Apple? And probably, they would be out of business. I think we are going to see things like that, but we have not worked out the details of it yet.

—Moulishree Srivastava

All of us in India are conscious that AI is now mature: C.P. Gurnani

In a conversation with Mint editors on the second day of the two-day EmTech India 2016 conference in New Delhi, C.P. Gurnani, chief executive officer and managing director of Tech Mahindra Ltd and also vice-chairman of the software industry body Nasscom, spoke about digital disruption in companies and how Indian information technology companies like his are banking on technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to help their clients strategize better in this digital age to enhance their business prospects.

“Let us take a look on where the Indian IT industry is. If it is manufacturing as a sector, now you talk of manufacturing 4.0. If you are talking about healthcare, now you are talking about every device you have being a diagnostic tool. When you talk about energy, you start thinking about energy being produced in your own house...effectiveness of solar cells eventually will become so high that you will produce it on your rooftop and will be able to consume it on your own. So you are now seeing demolition of trillions of dollars of existing industry and a new industry being created and the common theme everywhere is technology-enabled," he said.

The reality is that innovation has come to India, Gurnani emphasized. “Innovation was probably initiated in Silicon Valley but the reality is that statistics say 67% of that innovation has been powered by immigrants. Indian IT will adapt itself and luckily, we understand what the challenges are, understand what is required by us. That’s where our industry is headed," he added.

Gurnani cited examples of the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning by Indian IT companies.

“In Mahindra and Mahindra’s Chakan plants, for instance, a lot of work is right now is being done by robots. Tesla which is one of the highest selling cars, is doing its manufacturing in Fremont, California, US which by any definition is not the cheapest location to do manufacturing.

. The car is being manufactured between an individual and robots. These are examples where you can apply robots to do processes which are repetitive in nature and they will be more accurate and in the long run more economical--they do not ask for a pay raise every year and they do not have a union to negotiate with and all of those," Gurnani said.

Gurnani also highlighted the use of these technologies in the healthcare sector, where “you have started seeing some of the applications of machine learnings and artificial intelligence". He cited the case of Swasthya Slate--a device that allows Android tablets and phones to conduct 33 diagnostic tests--and “the many pilots they are doing in India".

“We found out that the diagnostics are much more accurate and can be done a lot faster and ultimately what you are seeing is a small transformation happening because of machine learning," Gurnani said.

But advanced technologies also require different skill sets. Are there, for instance, enough data scientists or AI researchers in India? “I guess it is true for any new technology. It is true whenever you have new technology being adopted, those become what in our industry, we call them ‘hot skills’," Gurnani replied. He added that “in hot skills, initially you do not have a choice but to get in those queen bees to create a farm. And that farm happens because we all invest in a fair amount of university training".

Gurnani said Indian IT companies, including Tech Mahindra, are developing their own AI platforms.

“Companies like Tech Mahindra have also invested in start-ups, like I invested in a start-up called Fixstream that is more focused on AI platform. You have heard of Wipro’s investment, you have heard of Infosys’s acquisition on the AI platform. All of us in India are conscious that AI is now mature," Gurnani said, adding that “it is my hope that tomorrow when Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to address those 3 crore cases of legal backlog, they would use some of our platforms".

Gurnani expressed satisfaction with the quality of start-ups and termed them “phenomenal".

“Frankly, it is an abundance of ideas. When we do a hackathon within Tech Mahindra, the number of participants and the number of ideas and the quality of the ideas that come in, it surprises you. I mean we think bitcoin and blockchain--these guys are thinking two steps ahead. Now like in every industry, you would find some ideas which look like repeat of a success but didn’t we have that in Indian movies? There have been ideas which have almost been lifted and then there are few ideas which are original. The good news is both of them thrive, survive and are successful. In the start-up, we have both. We will have a MakeMyTrip which is an improvisation of Expedia, we will have a Snapdeal which is an improvisation of Amazon and at the same time, we will have these very nice new bright ideas."

Gurnani forecast that “by 2020, successful companies would be talking of 60% automation and even average companies would be talking of at least 40% automation. The journey has just about begun. I do not think there is something very, very significant that has happened up till now".

—Priyanka Sahay

I wanted to make the mobile video hangout a bit more human: Myshkin Ingawale

Last year, I was running business operations of a company in India selling phones. I quit and I told my wife that I will build robots. She said, what robots? You mean like R2D2 from Star Wars? In her words, I was having an early onset of a mid-life crisis.

All my life, I had not been with the people who mattered the most to me. So I began thinking about what I could do to be in their lives a bit more. That’s how the whole telepresence concept dawned on me.

Cisco is supposedly the inventor of telepresence. Since then there have been quite a few developments in this field. I wanted to do something so I could play with my two-year-old son.

What it does from a technology perspective is very simple. I had this idea about making the mobile video hangout process a little more human; a little more consumable for a father and his toddler son.

We started thinking of a kind of pet. What about a Skype on wheels, or a tablet which moves around? Maybe with a bit of personality, but not really a robot. Not robocop, not R2D2 from Star Wars. That’s how it got built.

It uses the tablet’s processing power to turn into a robot. It’s actually about making technology invisible and going back to humans. At a recent conference, we had our robot running around doing interviews with business personalities.

A kid can start developing programmes on this robot. We have also built electric bikes with MIT. The difference in what we can do today and five years ago is quite a bit. I think the next five years are going to be crucial in this field.

The author is co-founder of OneMoreThing and co-creator of the I2U2 robot.

—Transcribed by Shine Jacob

Doing surgery with robots: Dr. Rooma Sinha

We have been talking about technology and robotics data. Can medicine be far behind? Technology and medicine today move hand in hand to enable doctors and surgeons like us to give the best outcomes.

Surgery is a branch of medical science that actually deals with disease treatment or injury by making incisions using instruments and in fact if it is done without the consent of a patient, it can almost amount to an assault.

The last few decades have a learning curve. We learn and we practice. Robotics surgery allows surgeons to move wrists inside the patients, without actually putting their hands in. That was the missing link before that has been provided by robotic surgery.

It allows surgeons to master the needles better. I operate through a console which has about five or six controls, including hand and foot controls. Though it looks difficult, it is not difficult to master.

Computer technologies are very enabling technologies and once we get a hang of it, we are able to extrapolate that to give the right treatment and right surgical options to the patient.

Now it is not the robots who operate but the surgeons. So the surgery is going to be as good as a surgeon’s skills.

The console allows surgeons to sit down next to the patient. There is a patient cart with robotic arms through which I insert my instruments to the patient’s abdomen and operate.

So how did all this start? It was started by the US Department of Defense along with the Stanford University where they were actually trying to figure out how to do tele-surgery. They wanted to devise a programme which would actually have surgeons sitting back and operating on wounded soldiers. Not very popular, but what came out of it was a telepresence surgery where the surgeon is very close to the patient and operates through a computer-enabled technology.

I think robotic surgery today is a revolution. It is changing the surgical world at a very fast pace. And as more and more robots come, more and more technology come, we will be having them as standard operating procedures.

Today the technology has changed, has made me a better surgeon who is able to do precise work. Why only talk about cancer, uterus, prostrate, we have surgeons in the city who are using this technology to transplant kidneys from one patient to another.

Transplants call for large incisions. However here usually there is a small hole through which the kidney is pushed in reanastomosis is done, kidney starts functioning.

Within 24-48 hours, a patient is back to work. This is what has made the robotic surgery patient-friendly. It not only helps patients but doctors too—I get a better technology and get a much better outcome.

What’s the cost? Right now surgical robots, approved to be used clinically world over, is being produced by only one company-- Intuitive Surgicals. Since there is a monopoly, the cost of the machine is prohibitive. But as time goes on, once we acquire the machine, we have our ways to cut cost for procedures. I think in the next 10 years, we will have many such prototypes which will be used all across the country.

Do we foresee a future where the human element is entirely removed? We have often thought about those things. I firmly believe in one thing. Biology and mathematics are different, we have to understand this. No two human beings can be exactly the same and that is how we are. I don’t think we can do away with the human factor. We can use a lot of data and robotic assistants for guidance but we cannot have artificial intelligence to decide if I need to cut this or leave it because often a doctor may operating for the same disease but each patient is different.

In the future, such a case may arise because science is progressing at a rapid pace but it is not possible as of now.

The author is head of robotics surgery at Apollo Hospitals.

— Transcribed by Shine Jacob

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Published: 24 Mar 2016, 02:05 AM IST
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₹1,484.10.99%
₹4,928.750.15%
₹3,837.51.2%
₹472.21.66%
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