India to join an elite global league with the help of Quantum technology

The Budget proposal to furnish an outlay of USD 1,117.94 million for quantum computing, which may make India the world’s third-biggest nation in the sector after China and the US.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, while presenting her second Union Budget on Saturday, said that quantum technology is opening up new borders in communications, cybersecurity, computing, with wide-spread applications. Also, a lot of commercial applications are estimated to develop from theoretical constructs emerging in this sector. It is proposed to provide expenses of 1117.94 million USD over five years for the National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications. The announcements on quantum computing will contribute significantly towards creating the digital infrastructure for government and industry.

According to Dharmender Kapoor, CEO; MD, Birlasoft, a software company, “The budget is aimed at the national assignment for quantum computing and application, which will position India with the globally elite countries. India would be the third biggest and a pioneering nation if we can break into quantum computing and application technology.

“Strategic initiatives aimed at leveraging new-age technologies such as the Internet-of-Things, robotics, machine learning, bioinformatics, quantum computing and artificial intelligence across industries will further help in laying the foundation of a robust, digital economy,” as per Mr. CP Gurnani, MD; CEO, Tech Mahindra.

The government has also exploited these new technologies to enable direct profit transfers and financial inclusion. The Finance Minister said there would soon be a policy to allow the private sector in building data center parks throughout the country, and thus enabling firms to incorporate data in every step of their value chains. From improving modeling chemical reactions and cybersecurity and to formulating new drugs and making supply chains more effective, quantum computing can help to create an ultra-powerful computer which solves problems that normal computers cannot. Since everyone is talking about quantum computing thanks to Budget 2020, it allows multiple calculations at once by exploiting the super-positions of qubits, enabling us to solve problems that would have taken conventional computers thousands of years to resolve.

Quantum computers can achieve vast computing power by replacing traditional bits such as the “ones” and “zeroes” used in digital communications with quantum bits, or qubits. Qubits found in a state of superposition, which means they can be in two states at once, instead of being restricted to a single binary state. This helps quantum computing systems to be more potent than regular computers and could solve computing challenges that are too far beyond the reach of todays fastest computers. It can also helps in significant ways in Blockchain-based industries such as banking and finance, energy and sustainability, digital identity, government and the public sector, healthcare and the life sciences, law, media and entertainment, international trade and commodities.