Reading the news about Union Minister Nitin Gadkari's confident projection that India's logistics costs will drop to a single digit by the end of this year was genuinely invigorating. His vision, as reported in articles like this one, is not just about numbers on a spreadsheet; it's about unclogging the arteries of our nation's economy.
For years, a logistics cost of 14-16% of GDP has been a significant drag on our competitiveness. Reducing this to 9% is a monumental leap, putting us on par with, and even ahead of, many developed nations. This is the tangible result of a relentless focus on building world-class roads and infrastructure, a testament to what determined leadership can achieve. Mr. Gadkari’s work is creating the physical pathways for a more efficient and prosperous India.
This focus on the seamless flow of physical goods got me thinking about a parallel I've often contemplated: the flow of information. The friction in the physical world—poor roads, congested ports, inefficient networks—has a direct counterpart in the digital realm.
I have written before about how data and information are becoming like air molecules, flowing freely and pervasively across the globe. The goal of our digital infrastructure should be to make this flow as frictionless as possible. Just as high physical logistics costs stifle trade, high information logistics costs—in the form of data silos, lack of access, and poor connectivity—stifle innovation and knowledge sharing.
On a more personal scale, I am grappling with this very concept in my quest for a digital twin. My efforts to enable an AI to access and learn from my decades of writing is, in essence, a problem of information logistics. How do I reduce the 'cost' and 'friction' of transferring my life's thoughts and experiences into a new, immortal form?
While Nitin Gadkari is masterfully engineering the superhighways for trucks and cargo, we must simultaneously engineer the superhighways for data and ideas. The efficiency of one will inevitably amplify the other. A future-ready India needs both—a nation where goods and knowledge can both move with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
Of course, if you wish, you can debate this topic with my Virtual Avatar at : hemenparekh.ai
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