ICT in Business and Society: E-commerce, Digital Marketing, Education, Healthcare, and E-governance

Somewhere between ordering groceries on an app, scrolling through Instagram ads, attending a webinar hosted by a professor in another city, and paying an electricity bill from your phone, you have already lived through most of what information and communication technology (ICT) means for business and society. ICT is simply the use of computers, networks, and digital devices to create, share, and act on information. What makes it worth studying is how thoroughly it has rewired four everyday systems: how we buy things, how we are sold to, how we learn, and how we access healthcare and government services.

E-commerce and the reshaping of retail 🔗

E-commerce refers to buying and selling goods and services over the internet, and it has changed retail more in two decades than the previous century of shopkeeping did. Global players such as Amazon and Alibaba built their dominance by removing geographic limits on who could buy from whom, and that same logic now plays out at a national scale. The e-commerce industry was valued at roughly 125 billion dollars in 2024 and is projected to reach 345 billion dollars by 2030, driven by rising internet penetration, digital payments, and platforms ranging from large marketplaces to quick-commerce apps.

Small businesses go global 🔗

The most interesting part of this shift is not the big platforms, it is who else gets to sell on them. Micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that once depended on local footfall can now list a product on a marketplace and ship it across the country, or the world. Consulting estimates suggest e-commerce’s share of overall retail could rise from around 6 percent to as high as 11 percent by 2030, with MSMEs contributing close to half of that growth. Government-backed initiatives such as the Open Network for Digital Commerce are lowering the technical and financial barriers that once kept smaller sellers out of digital retail, while direct-to-consumer channels, where a business sells through its own website or app rather than a marketplace, are growing nearly three times faster than traditional marketplace sales.

How traditional retailers are adapting 🔗

Brick-and-mortar retailers have not disappeared, they have restructured. Many now run an omnichannel model, letting customers browse online and pick up in-store, or return an online purchase at a physical counter. Store staff increasingly double as fulfilment centres for local deliveries. The retailers that struggled were the ones that treated their website as an afterthought rather than as another storefront competing for the same customer’s attention.

Digital marketing strategies that reach the right audience 🔗

Digital marketing is the use of digital channels, email, search engines, and social media among them, to promote products and services. Its core advantage over a newspaper advertisement or a billboard is precision: a brand can target a message to people based on age, location, past purchases, or even browsing behaviour, rather than paying to reach everyone who happens to walk past.

This precision matters more each year because the audience keeps growing. There were over 806 million internet users and 491 million social media users at the start of 2025, a base large enough that even a narrowly targeted campaign can reach millions of relevant people. Advertisers have followed the audience: digital advertising has overtaken television to command around 44 percent of total ad spending, worth roughly 49,000 crore rupees, marking 20 percent year-on-year growth.

Personalised messaging over mass broadcasting 🔗

A clothing brand no longer needs to hope the right person sees its ad in a general-interest magazine. It can show a monsoon-jacket ad specifically to users in cities with current rainfall, at the time of day they are most likely to shop. This is the practical difference between targeted marketing and traditional advertising.

Measuring what actually works 🔗

Perhaps the bigger shift is measurement. A digital campaign reports clicks, conversions, time spent, and drop-off points in real time, letting a business adjust spending mid-campaign instead of waiting for a quarterly sales report to find out an advertisement failed. This data feedback loop is what allows even small businesses to compete with large advertisers on efficiency, if not on total budget.

ICT in education: learning without geographic limits 🔗

Education has been one of the most visibly transformed sectors. Platforms such as Coursera and Udemy let a student access a course designed by a professor at a foreign university without ever leaving their home city, collapsing a barrier that once required significant money and mobility to cross.

India’s own open learning platform 🔗

India built a parallel system for this through SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds), a government-run platform offering free courses from school level through postgraduate study. Regulatory changes now allow universities to let students earn up to 40 percent of their programme credits through SWAYAM courses, meaning online learning is no longer just supplementary, it can formally count toward a degree. The platform’s scale illustrates both the promise and the difficulty of online education: enrolment numbers run into the tens of millions, but course completion has historically lagged far behind sign-ups, a reminder that access to content is not the same as sustained engagement with it.

Smart classrooms and blended learning 🔗

Inside physical classrooms, ICT shows up as interactive whiteboards, tablets loaded with curriculum apps, and shared documents that let a class collaborate on a project in real time rather than passing around a single notebook. Institutions increasingly blend this with in-person teaching, using recorded lectures for content delivery and classroom time for discussion and doubt-clearing, a model that stretches limited teaching staff further without diluting instruction quality.

ICT in healthcare: records, remote care, and wearables 🔗

Healthcare has absorbed ICT in ways that directly affect how quickly a patient gets treated. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) store a patient’s medical history digitally, so a doctor in one city can access test results ordered by a doctor in another, instead of relying on physical files that a patient must carry themselves. India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission has built this infrastructure at national scale, issuing digital health IDs to a large share of the population and linking prescriptions and reports to those records so that care history follows the patient rather than the hospital.

Telemedicine reaching where doctors cannot 🔗

Telemedicine, consulting a doctor remotely through video or audio, addresses a very specific Indian problem: an uneven distribution of specialists, with severe shortages at primary and community health centres in many states. The government’s eSanjeevani platform, described as the world’s largest telemedicine service for primary care, has facilitated over 340 million consultations connecting patients to doctors across more than a hundred thousand health centres. Usage data shows the platform disproportionately serves women, older adults, and patients in areas with limited access to specialists, which is exactly the population a purely hospital-based system tends to underserve.

Wearables and everyday health monitoring 🔗

Fitness trackers and smartwatches have moved health monitoring out of the clinic and into daily life. Tracking heart rate, sleep, and activity levels continuously gives both individuals and, increasingly, doctors far more data than an annual check-up ever could, making it easier to catch an irregular pattern before it becomes a medical emergency.

E-governance: government services without the queue 🔗

E-governance uses digital platforms to deliver government services and information directly to citizens, cutting out the physical queues and paperwork that used to define interactions with government offices. Under the Digital India programme, citizens can now pay taxes, apply for permits, and access certificates online rather than visiting an office in person. Tools like DigiLocker allow people to store official documents digitally, with the platform now used by over 11 crore people holding more than 532 crore documents issued by thousands of government and private organisations.

Beyond documents, digital payment infrastructure and direct benefit transfer systems let government welfare payments reach citizens’ bank accounts directly, reducing the layers through which money could previously be diverted or delayed. This is arguably where ICT’s impact on society is most visible, because it changes not just convenience but accountability: a digital trail is harder to manipulate than a paper one.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? As more essential services, from shopping to healthcare to government paperwork, move online by default, what happens to people who still lack reliable internet access or digital literacy? And when a business can track your clicks closely enough to predict what you will buy next, where should the line sit between helpful personalisation and simply feeling watched?

References

1. https://www.ibef.org/industry/ecommerce
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/logistics/our-insights/the-great-unbundling-of-indian-e-commerce-msmes-and-the-direct-to-consumer-revolution
3. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-india
4. https://www.ipsos.com/en-in/state-digital-marketing-india-2025-26
5. https://swayam.gov.in/about
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S3050837125000049
7. https://academic.oup.com/oodh/article/doi/10.1093/oodh/oqaf025/8276784
8. https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=1847837&reg=48&lang=2