India’s policy regime should be pro-innovation, light touch and progressive if it wants its entrepreneurs to grow and prosper, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said, though challenges of cyber security, land acquisition and huge pendency of court cases remain.

“My view is that your policy regime should be pro-innovation, light touch and progressive. You should benchmark yourself against the world’s best and even better than the world’s best,” he said on Tuesday.

According to Kant, India is creating three unicorns a month and this has been possible because young entrepreneurs are tapping into huge data available and using it to technologically leapfrog.

“The challenge, as we grow along, will be the challenge of cybersecurity and India needs to equip itself for cybersecurity. Indians will trust the digital means,” Kant said.

“India needs to really work a lot on cyber security so that we are ready to meet future challenges and that’s critical to my mind,” he added.

Kant was speaking on The Growth Trinity – Digital Innovation, Sustainability, Social Balance at the Microsoft Future Challenge, the flagship event of Microsoft India.

Talking about the challenges being faced by entrepreneurs in acquiring land, Kant said, the only way you can solve your land issues is using satellites for land records. “You need new technologies. Geographical maps is what you need to do and India has liberalized that regime.”

Vouching for liberal use of drones, Kant said, “Controlling drones is not the solution. You need to liberalize this because that’s the area of the future,” he said, adding you need to handle rogue drones through a separate anti-drone policy.

Reiterating that the large number of pending judicial cases in India is due to lack of technology and unavailability of land data, Kant said the Indian judicial system should embrace technology in a big way.

“I don’t think it’s physically or humanly possible to bring down cases without two simple things. The number of cases cannot be reduced without using artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he said.

“Also, we need to crack this huge challenge of availability of land records as 70% of the cases in India relate to land. Therefore, we need to use satellite data for land,” Kant added.

Talking about India’s transition to clean energy including green hydrogen, Kant said India has set ambitious targets for itself and will have to really use solar energy to crack water and create green hydrogen.

“The important thing to understand is that the Western world took 40 to 71 years to move from peaking to net zero. We are going to do this in a very, very short period. And therefore, India’s targets are really ambitious and audacious and India can only do this by really making a massive technological jump,” he added.