Public sector in India is Looking at the Next Wave of Digitization and Digital transformation

How is digital transformation transforming the public sector, and what are the trends that you are observing?

Pankaj: India’s public sector is witnessing a huge wave of digital innovation and digital transformation across the country. As citizens of India, we all know the kind of large scale and we'd rather call them population scale platform, whether it is Aadhaar, UPI platforms that government has built. At the same time, we have been working with government of India very closely and we have also built some of the world's largest population scale platforms.

CoWIN is the world's largest COVID vaccination system, which has done 2.2 billion vaccinations or 1.2 billion registrations. It was also the world's fastest-growing tech platform that did 200 million vaccinations within three months or 300 million vaccinations in four months. So that's the kind of scale, elasticities or agility we are looking at that is cloud-enabled. Similarly, we have a lot of other platforms across the board on these citizen services that the government is looking at accelerating the pace of digital services to the citizens. Digi locker is one great example. Digi locker is being used by more than 200 citizens; it is like a personal digital wallet to store and access your authentic digital documents. We worked with the government of India to migrate and modernize that application on the cloud, as they were facing scalability issues. Today, Digi locker is being evolved into a lot of other use cases, like health locker or entity locker.

Similarly, CoWIN is now being evolved into something called the universal immunization platform, where the government is looking at adding 12 more vaccines, diphtheria, BCG, tetanus, polio. So, whether it is healthcare, agriculture, or education and now we would like to talk about is the aviation sector, where we've been able to work with WAISL on the completely digital twin-based airport operation command center.

How do you perceive the progress of digital transformation in the aviation sector, particularly in India?

Rishi: Just like any other enterprise vertical, even aviation has very similar business levers. Airports today have to look at revenue enhancement, passenger experience and operation efficiency. So, if you look at these three business levers, that's where the transformation journey, digital and otherwise, basically needs to come and help in all these three levers. That's why WAISL has partnered with the airport ecosystem to help on all these three business levers using the digital transformation.

India is witnessing the first of many kinds of applications and growth. For example, DG yatra today has been adopted by close to 20% of the domestic travellers, and that's actually massive growth compared to the same technologies, biometric technology used by other countries. That's a push coming on the use of digital technologies as part of the transformation process. What that has done is elevate the customer experience completely. Customers can go from curb to gate now in a matter of a few minutes instead of having to spend a few hours like the previous times, and that has also unlocked the capacity for the airport operators.

Similarly, that's exactly what we're doing now with other programs, like APOC, which is an airport operations command center based on the digital twin and predictive analytics. The whole idea there is to give a very transformative experience to multiple stakeholders in the airport. These stakeholders are operations teams, ground handlers, security and, of course, the passenger is the beneficiary. These are some of the first of many kinds we are seeing. Some of these applications are now becoming first in Asia also. India is actually leapfrogging, they are not trying to go through these traditional steps, they're actually leapfrogging quite a few steps. Now that's what we're excited about.

How do you balance cost optimization with implementing cutting-edge digital solutions in aviation?

Rishi: Implementing these technologies costs a lot of money. What we have done is the way we run this business model and partnership is we do a lot of heavy lifting. WAISL does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of spending the initial capex to bring all the technologies. These technologies can be 5G Wi Fi, DG Yatra, cloud technologies, others and now the APOC. We try not to charge up front to the airport ecosystem because the airport has to run at a certain level. After all, it's offering a service to the citizens, so we charge this as part of a managed service. We do the initial Capex spending, bring in the technology then run the entire operations 24/7, the technology operations of the airport, and then we charge the fee as a managed service spread over a long period of time. So that's one way from our business model we are able to help airports to stay very competitive in terms of cost.

Second, when airports they're using technologies, they are letting go of a lot of other related aspects, whether it's additional manpower or the delays which actually lead to a lot of inefficiencies. For example, if you're not managing the resources properly in the airport, your gates and terminals and other resources that there is a concept like turnaround time of the crafts, then you cannot service many numbers of crafts. As a result, it cannot accommodate many passengers. That's how a lot of airports are saying there is a limit to how much they can expand my airport to, which means they need to bring in technology interventions to serve more customers per square feet. That can be done only through technology now. That's where they're able to then, basically, save the cost.

In the context of India, what are the key growth areas and emerging opportunities for AWS?

Pankaj: The Government or public sector in India is looking at the next wave of digitization and digital transformation. One of the key levers that we are seeing, which are the key trends, is lot of customers we engage have scattered applications or maybe siloed environments. They are looking at bringing those applications together. But at the same time, with those applications which are siloed and scattered across the enterprise are the separate data platforms also, and now for any organization to be intelligent, or even for them to leverage these New Age technologies like Gen AI, data forms the foundation of anything that happens on that. The one thing is, a lot of our customers are looking at building these enterprise data platforms into a very integrated, and we call it something like a data-like framework. It could be structured data, unstructured data, images, documents, videos, or the kind of data that is available from different kinds of applications. One is pulling this data together, and once you have that data available in a data lake, then the data has to talk to each other, making it very interoperable. Once that happens, you start drawing insights from that. Once you are drawing insights, you start drawing outputs from that.

The second thing is security plays a very important role. As AWS, we provide more than 300 security governance compliance features and services, and we provide 143 security certifications and standards, whether it is PCI, DSS for the payment industry, HIPAA for the healthcare industry, or even FIPS for the encryption standards. Security becomes very important, and we believe in something called a shared responsibility model, where the security of the host operating system to the virtualization layer or maybe to the physical security of the data centres, we take care of that. But after that, really securing your applications in the cloud is what our customers do. After that, we provide a lot of third-party best practices, security tools, configuration management, and data access controls. A lot of those tools are available to our customers and partners, which they can leverage.

How do you assess the competitive landscape in the public sector market, particularly in relation to your competitors?

Pankaj: We are customer obsessed. We like to work backwards from the requirements of our customers. 90% of our roadmap is driven by what customers tell us matters to them. That is the reason a lot of our announcements are the outcome of when we hear or listen to our customers, and even the remaining 10% is when customers are not able to articulate; we try to read between the lines and innovate on behalf of our customers.

The second thing is we work with partners in terms of trying to come up solutions which are very practical, which are real hard world problems. That is where we are looking at making a positive impact to the life of every citizen of India. For me, the customer is a citizen of India, it could be a patient, student, or a citizen.

At the same time, we welcome competition because competition helps us be more innovative. In the public sector context, there are more than 20+ cloud providers who are empanelled with the Ministry of Electronics and IT, and it is a choice available to our customers. We work very closely with our customers so that they can make informed decisions, whether it is helping them do experimentation, use case evaluation or even do proof of concepts.

Please talk about challenges you have encountered when integrating legacy systems with new digital technologies in aviation.

Rishi: An Airport is a multi-stakeholder environment; there is a ground handler, security, operations, and each stakeholder has certain responsibilities. So, when you come out of the digital transformation paradigm, even to help on the three levers, the task of convincing the different stakeholders to see it with the same lens becomes difficult. That's the biggest hurdle. We have to work with all the stakeholders to make it happen, and it's a very challenging task. The solution has to fit all the stakeholders.

The second part is the whole idea to retrain these stakeholders for a new experience altogether. Airports are like a mission critical entity, they cannot really fail even under the adverse conditions and there are certain procedures, SOPs which are laid out day in day out, which have to be followed.

What I have learned, which is applicable in aviation and I've learned in other industries also is that you make them the partners very early on. So, I subscribe to a model called sell, design, build, and sell. What that first sell does is before even selling a concept, a product or a solution, you sell just a prototype or a notion or an idea. You make the customer a partner in the journey, articulate the problem back to them and articulate the solution. Make them the partner in the proof of concept early on so that they can start giving you inputs. That’s what we did in the case of DigiYatra.

What strategies have you used to get buy-in from stakeholders for digital transformation projects?

Rishi : The best is customer centricity. You have to realize there are multiple customers and treat each of them as your customers and partners. Now, what that implies is that we have to understand a day in their life, understand their customer journey and persona, what they go through, what makes them so unique in handling their jobs, what are their pain points and what is that they truly value. Instead of me selling my value proposition to them, I got to understand what they truly value and then figure out what value proposition makes sense to them. The value proposition that will make sense to them is what will take care of their pain points.

Please share insights on some of AWS's new initiatives in India or other developing markets.

Pankaj: The Government continues to build on what they have started. In the case of the government and public sector, they're looking at solving their hard-core problems. The public sector in India is looking at 1.4 billion people, 36 states and union territories. Everything has to be an impact and innovation at scale. One example is the National Health Authority of India, Pradhan Mantri Jana Arogya Yojna. It is the world's largest health insurance or health insurance scheme, which is government-funded. The government is looking at providing free health insurance of up to five lakh rupees to 550 million poor and vulnerable people in India. Talking about the impact of this platform, this platform was running on government data centers. We worked with them to migrate and modernize this on the AWS cloud with their key systems where they looking at identifying all the beneficiaries. We spoke to about 550 million people, the hospital empanelment system. This system has onboarded a strong network of 30,000 public and private hospitals already, and then some transactions have to happen. It does around 1.2 million claims a month with 2.5 million documents. As far as hospitalizations are concerned, in the last five years, it has already done 70 million hospitalizations worth 11.2 billion dollars. The government has generated 350 million Ashman Bharat health IDs.

We worked with the Government of India to build a fraud analytics solution using technology like GenAI. We worked with them to pull together the data from disparate siloed systems into one central data lake with both structured and unstructured data. In real time, they can identify the fake claims that are being put into the system. We can provide from Gen AI to Gen BI (business intelligence) to the decision maker so that they're able to take actions against those fake claims.

The second thing is the largest government system, like Government E-marketplace (GeM), which is very soon expected to become the world's largest B2B marketplace from 50 billion dollars of GMV to 100 billion dollars of GMV. We worked for the government to migrate and modernize that platform. This platform does close to 9000 page views per second, 1.5 million interactions per day and 1000 crores of GMV per day. The main thing is the way this platform has made the entire B2B e-commerce very inclusive and equitable because they have 1.2 million sellers, 370,000 buyers, and a large part of these sellers comes from tier two and tier three cities. Till now, they were not able to participate in this huge opportunity. But now, with these things becoming online, those people from small tier two and tier three cities can participate in this public procurement. At the same time, GeM is also leveraging Gen AI for Dynamic Query resolution and conversational chatbots, which is what they're looking at building with us.

What are some notable use cases of cloud computing you’ve observed across businesses? 

Pankaj: The Public sector for us is a combination of government, which is split into central government and state and local government. In the state government, we are also seeing a huge amount of technology adoption across the states. One example that I will give is the digital innovation that is happening in the power distribution space. Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd. (MSEDCL) happens to be one of the world's largest power distribution companies. We worked with them to migrate and modernize more than 100 applications and helped them achieve 99.95% of SLA. They were able to drive more than 30% of cost savings.

The other use cases, on the B2B enterprise side like Coal India, which is like a public sector enterprise, one of the Maharatnas happens to be producing more than 80% of India's coal production. They have 350+ mines and 250,000 employees. Again, as COAL India was looking at being a more digitally transformed company or an enterprise, we worked with them to come up with new use cases. We also helped them migrate some of their internal applications, which are more about employee productivity, vigilance. More importantly, they were looking at building solutions around connected mines, and we worked with them.

Another use case that I will talk about is how Coal India is using Gen AI. They were doing a lot of RFPs, and every time they looked at the RFPs, they found it very difficult to look at the best practices of doing an RFP. There was a lot of documentation that went into it. So, we worked with them to build a central repository on Gen AI, which is giving them proactive intelligence and ease of use so that they can look at standard templates. Earlier what it used to take them maybe one and a half months to build a standard template; now, they're able to do it within a few days.

These are the kind of new use cases that we are seeing being adopted by the larger public sector and it is unlocking a larger potential and possibilities across the board, whether it is manufacturing, whether it is logistics, education, supply chain.

Which industry verticals, in your opinion, are adopting cloud technology at an accelerated pace?

Pankaj: Overall, if you see as far as cloud adoption is concerned, not just in India but across the world, we are still at the early stages of cloud adoption in the public sector and enterprises. Gone are the days when the public sector was the laggard in terms of adopting, but today, with all these use cases that I spoke about, the Government of India seems to be at the forefront of adopting these newest technologies. So, I think when we see working with the government across the board and maybe enterprises across the board, all the sectors are adopting cloud and they embracing cloud for solving the real-life use cases.

How would you use digital channels to improve communication and transparency with passengers during disruptions?

Rishi: We have come out with a B2C application called the Hoi application. Its main job is to touch upon, along the way, the road traffic, the airport traffic, the airlines and communicate everything.

As soon as a passenger leaves home, the Hoi app will be able to tell whether your flight is on time or delayed, how much time it will take at the airport, how long the queues are, lounge is available or not. This is to keep your documents in check. We'll keep communicating with you, and when you come in actually to the airport, you can start using the same app, and you'll be given a very contextualized service. We want to make the entire experience in the airport very easy and less stressful for you. That's the reason we have come out with this special app, which has already been launched also, and it's being used in a couple of airports now.

It's not tied to any airline you just download it. It helps you through your entire passenger journey. Primarily for these reasons, we make your journey very seamless, we can also talk to you through this app when there is some calamity or not.

-- As Narrated to Shipra Sinha