India’s Aadhaar put Japan far behind tech curve, admits Japanese ‘father of Internet’

A top Japanese technocrat, often hailed as the ‘father of the internet’ in Japan, has lauded India’s Aadhaar and India Stack for putting the country on the path of drastic technological advancements while putting Japan far behind the technology curve.

“We were far behind after the Indian deployment of Aadhaar and India stack, especially because we didn’t have the numbers,” Jun Murai said while delivering a video address at the India Japan Science Technology Innovation Forum at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru (IIT Bengaluru). 

He also added that India’s success in the tech sector had forced other nations to change and reform their strategies. Murai said Japan was now trying to imitate what India did in helping its remote villages and towns achieve access to the internet.

“We are doing what India has done much ahead of time in terms of facilitating small towns and villages with internet access,” he said.

Internet reach got a boost during the COVID-19 years

Jun Murai, who is also known as Internet Murai in Japan, said that the three years of COVID-19 saw faster adoption of internet and broadband across the world.

Drawing a parallel, Murai said while only 6 per cent of the global population had access to the internet in the year 2000, today almost 70 per cent of the world’s population is online.

Watch: Worldcoin: Sam Altman's crypto venture, to replicate India's Aadhaar

“In the last two decades, internet availability and adoption have rapidly grown, as internet and connectivity have become the core energy and core environment for all activities. However, the acceleration brought by the pandemic changed the pace all together,” he said.

Internet- A basic necessity

Murai also added that just like power, food, transportation and supply chains, the internet has become a critical infrastructure in today’s age.

“Today, almost everybody is equipped with a supercomputer called a smartphone and everyone is connected and they have a lot of computing power attached to their body,” Murai further said.

Also read: India`s biggest data breach? Covid information of over 800 million people leaked

“In Ukraine, we found that electricity is key for digital infrastructure. Energy and communication must exist together to realise what we might today consider as “core infrastructure”, he noted.

(With inputs from agencies)