2020 might as well have been the year that made time stand still.
The shock and awe experienced by the virus-gripped world is unmatched in our collective memory of the last few decades. Globally, millions of families lost their loved ones to the pandemic. I too lost a family member – my grandmother – this year, but not to COVID19. She was ninety-nine years old, and over time, we had kind of come to anticipate the loss. But it’s one thing to experience the natural cycle of life and death where we lose someone who has lived a full life. It’s another thing entirely to lose someone in a matter of days in the face of a deadly virus.
Even those who were fortunate enough to not have lost anyone this year were shaken by the lockdown. People were stranded apart across cities (and even countries) from their family and friends. From sons and daughters worrying about their stranded parents to expatriates wondering if and when they would be back in their country again, this year tested our resilience to its limit. Some of us made it through – with a lot of luck and privilege to back us up. Others didn’t. But the vast majority of us are largely going with the flow, wondering what awaits us next.
I find it almost impossible to grasp the scale that the virus has reached now. Even in the early days of 2020, when the virus was just making its presence known, I had spent an exciting couple of weeks in Melbourne and Sydney attending the Pause Fest and actively networking with the business and tech community there. The year, therefore, had started on a note of hope and opportunity, even though the virus had expanded its footprint in South Asia by that time. Against all odds, the trip to Australia had happened, and I am so glad it did, because not only was it a great success but also the only international exposure I could get this year as my later trips like the one to Europe were cancelled.
From March 2020, India went into a complete lockdown. However, even before the lockdown announcement was made, we had taken the call as a team to put our people’s safety first and resort to home-based working. The fact that all our projects and activities are meticulously planned and all our systems were operable from the cloud meant that we were pandemic-ready from day one. Even so, we went through a period of readjustment to the new way of working together from remote stations.
This was also the time when we got a chance to showcase our mettle as a highly capable tech team working from the remote mountains. Within a matter of just a few weeks, we launched three COVID applications for the State of Himachal Pradesh in collaboration with the Government’s IT department and the Health Department. These three applications – the curfew pass, the quarantine management app, and the COVID portal – became the lifeline of the State and the people in countering the pandemic that was cracking down on the country in full force by now. Our team worked on a rapid delivery mode where apps were launched in a matter of days and thousands of applications and user sessions had to be processed every day.
Along with COVID projects, our core projects also went on as our clients were largely unaffected by the economic downturn due to the pandemic and chose to continue working with us throughout the year. In fact, for many of our partners and clients, choosing to avail of our services was a great decision in hindsight as we were able to create a significant difference in their bottom line through our tech-for-growth services. Several new partners and clients also joined forces with us this year, but we did not quite reach the revenue projections that we had made for ourselves for 2020. Having said that, we just feel fortunate to have sailed through this year with a number of amazing projects on hand and several high-value partnerships floating in.
For the coming year, we already have a number of projects to be excited about. There’s the project with a client in Hyderabad, India, where we will be creating an e-commerce platform to help specially-abled children to avail of certain services. We are also thrilled to become the technology partner to a Hospitality recruitment and talent grooming startup in Ireland that are looking to transform the industry there with a novel business model.
Last but not least, we are working on an in-house ERP product that we are looking forward to taking big in the next year. It is already in the beta-testing phase and will see a roll-out soon. Our ISP team has been growing from strength to strength as well given the fresh ties with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) – India’s largest ISP firm in the public domain – that will help us take it to new heights and reach the benefits of the internet to the remotest corners of the mountain State of Himachal Pradesh.
Here’s hoping that 2021 marks a global rebound from the woes of the COVID-19 pandemic and that we as a community come out of it unscathed.