India as Knowledge Society

The growth of any country depends on its technological advancement.

I was discussing with my colleague during a buisness trip on topics like evolution, technology and India. I have always admired his wisdom and thinking towards any topic on Earth!

We were trying to find out what are the strengths and weakness of India as a nation and what measures we should take for its growth. A very interesting point came out as a result that, evolution is a process of overcoming the challenges around for the survival - struggle for existence. From evolutionary point of view, humans are most advanced species on Earth and what makes them stand apart from other species is "Not just changing themselves according to environment but to change their environment using the TECHNOLOGY".

It is evident that countries that lead today, besides their pool of natural resource, are advanced due to their technologies.

In this age of Information Technology where the world is becoming a knowledge society, any country that makes best use of its existing knowledge to turn it into technologies of future will stand fittest.

India for that matter, is quite ahead in this area considering several advancements of the nation. Recent Chandrayana is an example. Historically, India holds a significant position in sciences and I doubt if most of that knowledge has been translated into everyday use technology. Ayurveda and Yoga might be few examples that are popular, however, other ends still remain open.

There were times when India's population was considered bane and global brains were storming to come up with a solution to a TERRA problem. But the problem now seems to have found a solution for itself - thanks to IT. Suddenly the information which remained dormant across communities seem to be gathered at one place and people realize that information and knowledge is not limited to office walls. Networking has now come to desktop and you dont need to spend your rupees on traveling and other overheads.

Information and Knowledge from across the value chain and across geographies can now be recycled to add value back to the communities. Information and knowledge arise at individual level and following Globalization, another revolution that followed was Individualization, where individual opinion became of highest importance. Today ONE customer opinion can change the Genetic Code of a company - suddenly the Numero Uno has become statistically significant, which earlier was could only be appreciated at status quo level.

If we re-align the world ranking in terms of knowledgebase and also consider the individual as multiplier.

Knowledge Score = (Average knowledge of individual) X (Total Population of the Country)

In those terms, India should be the No. 2 country in the world.

What will follow Individualization is - Normalization - where entire population is integrated to share its knowledge at one common platform and hence the a Common knowledge exists.
This is however, is influenced by plethora of factors - such as - Interest Groups and Special Communities. Nevertheless, a world can be classified indifferent knowledge communities.
Particularly in India, the technical brains need to connect to create a Technical knowledge society and following things will follow as per discussion above -

1. Normalization across community
2. Uniform knowledge across community

1+1 = 3 Model:

The equation is strongly positioned against the arithematic model, however, this has nothing to with arithematrics. It is more a theory based on philosophy of creation.

Consider two individuals A and B with X amount of knowledge. Considering the average knowledge, we assign each individual a numeral 1. When these two idividuals are allowed to share their knowledge, then as a result of discussion a new knowledge is created which in sum will be the addition of their knowledge and the new knowledge created. Assuming a new knowldge at every topic discussed, the total knowledge now becomes 3.

This is more or less similar to the value appreciation of credit.