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Kuljit Bains
ISRO, the poster body of Indian science, delivered its fair share of headlines for research and development in the country in 2014 — the Mars Orbiter Mission Spacecraft’s (MOMS) entering the red planet’s orbit, of course, being the highlight. The Mangalyaan also found applause for the dramatic cost at which it was carried out — less than it cost to produce the famous Hollywood space flick Gravity. It was also the first mission to reach the Mars orbit in its first attempt. The programme was as much an example of India’s technical prowess as ingenuity (jugaad, as many would call it). ISRO, therefore, would like to draw attention to its other achievements as much — the recent successful launch of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark–III, for one.
On the global front, Rosetta — a robotic space probe built and launched by the European Space Agency — made news when its lander module, Philae, made the first soft-landing ever on a comet nucleus when it touched down on “67P” on November 12, 2014. Rosetta is performing a detailed study of the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which among other things is expected to give us a greater insight into the formation of earth.
All this stuff found premium space on newspaper front pages, but the piece of technology the common man put his finger on in 2014 literally was the smartphone. iPhone 6 made news, but then that is not what contributed to the 84 per cent increase in the sale of smartphones in the second quarter of this year (compared to the same period last year). It was the cheap Rs 6,000 phone (Rs 2,000 in the second-hand market) that broke the ‘poverty barrier’ like nothing else. With this the man living in a JJ Colony has the same access to information technology as the one living in Antilla. He can now book his LPG cylinder, get banking access or even find customers for his vegetable rehri — all through his not-so-humble Xiaomi, Micromax, or Xolo.
A smartphone may be first bought for its fun (or Whatsapp) quotient, but it is the fundamental changes that it is going to bring about in the way we live and our economies function that we need to watch out for. Glimpses of it were seen in 2014. Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon shocked us through the year with the staggering amounts of foreign dollars they were able to attract. According to some estimates, the Indian online retail market is estimated to grow over fourfold to touch $14.5 billion (over Rs88,000 crore) by 2018. The traditional retail sector was expectedly upset, and complained to the government about the ‘unfair’ practices of online retailers.
With all this, 2014 may well have changed forever the way you and I look at technology.
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