Involved in the strategic direction for HID’s IDT Business, Vijay is responsible for nurturing the company's leadership team which includes the growth and distribution of RFID solutions and products across each of these regions - Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. As far as education is concerned, Vijay is a postgraduate holding an MBA from Symbiosis and has been in the auto ID industry for over two decades.

When we look at the global and Indian RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) market, it is expected to grow triple-fold as compared to what it was and has been. Talking about numbers, the market would be roughly valued at $31.4 billion by 2029. In recent years, the Government of India has been heavily focusing on digitization across various Government verticals. RAIN RFID is a wireless technology that connects billions of everyday items to the internet, enabling businesses and consumers to identify, locate, authenticate, and engage each item. Read/write operations on tagged items can occur without line-of-sight, at longer distance and faster speed compared to other passive technologies, thus allowing a cheaper and more efficient process automation.

This is an essential part of digitization especially within the supply chain. At HID, we have in depth knowledge of all deployment aspects of a RAIN RFID installation, together with our large partners’ network. We are committed to various initiatives driven within the Road & Transport, Railways, Oil & Gas and Healthcare verticals. Linen and Laundry are another interesting space in India which is yet to be explored. Our Textile Inventory Management solutions provides real-time inventory management software, RFID tags, equipment, and cloud services to efficiently identify, track and manage linen and other textile assets. One of the strongest use cases for India could be our Indian Railways which manages of tons of laundry daily.

There are significant areas where RFID as a technology could provide quick return on investments (ROI) and this ranges from Transport, Logistics, Retail to Healthcare, Pharma, Food Chain, Industrial Manufacturing, Banking, Security and Access Control. HID has various product offerings for each of these industries and can provide the technology and technical support with best-in-class solution offerings that can enable industries keep up with growth, management people and asset inventory and have better visibility across their supply chains. HID has over two decades of RFID development, innovation, and manufacturing expertise, and we are confident of meeting India's growing demands.

India Driving into Digital India

There is a lot of focus on Digitizing Supply Chains under the Digital India campaign, some of the initiatives in India include PM Gati Shakti launched by Hon. Prime Minister Shri. Narendra Modi. It is a visionary initiative to ensure last mile reach of services rendered by the government by improving infrastructure and connectivity. This is a great beginning, and we believe that HID RFID solutions will play a vital role in successful implementation of Digital India campaign across various verticals. Our range of products within the different frequency protocols – LF, HF & UHF, identification of assets – both human and material becomes cost effective and easy. It will enable ease of identification, information management, real-time visibility of goods and products that are transported across the supply chain thus brining increased efficiency and effectiveness to our lives. HID has also increased its product portfolio with new age technology products that combine features and technical advantages of Bluetooth, LoRaWAN and Sensor Based solutions.

When it comes to challenges, both from a technical and commercial perspective, I believe India has already adopted RFID quite a few years ago. The National Industrial Corridor Container Tracking project using RFID is one such project where our tags have been used to track millions of containers moving within the country. But it is now getting ready to adopt technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy, LoRaWAN and combining these with sensors like condition monitoring. So, technically we are at par with the adoption of technology solutions.

Commercially, businesses need to see the long-term benefits they can reap by bringing these technologies. I believe that the time is right for RFID adoption and this won’t be a challenge for too long. Although the RFID industry continues to expand, there are still obstacles to overcome, particularly in certain markets. Chip shortages will be a problem in the immediate term. We've begun to see that the chip shortage is causing supply to fall short of demand, resulting in price increases. The two most important issues to address in order to achieve widespread RFID adoption in the mid to long term would be educating the industry and standardization.

RFID In 10 Years

Why 10, even 5 years down the line, we can expect a stronger and deeper adoption of RFID technology in our daily life.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an exciting, rapidly growing, multidisciplinary technology, which is capable of automatically and uniquely identifying objects or persons by radio frequency within certain proximity. It is emerging as one of most fundamental technologies to ubiquitous computing, Internet of Things, intelligent transport systems, and web of things owing its low cost, automatic identification and broad applicability. RFID has achieved widespread success in various domains, ranging from animal identification, asset tracking, highway toll collection, smart home appliances, supply chain management, to surveillance systems.

HID works with governments, educational institutions, hospitals, financial institutions, industrial businesses and some of the most innovative companies on the planet. Our support extends to more than 100 countries. We are a leader in RFID smart component suppliers globally. India is of strategic importance to us and we are fully committed to offer our product offerings to meet India’s growing RFID demands while also supporting Digital India.