Building Digital Infrastructure For Economic Growth

The ‘Digital India’ program launched in July 2015 was focused on three key vision areas – infrastructure as a utility to every citizen, governance and services on demand and digital empowerment of citizens.

- Thyagarajan Seshadri

Utilizing the transformative power of technology and building digital infrastructure can be a critical breakthrough for the Indian economy.

BUILDING DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE

The banking sector in India is an extremely dynamic one and Digital infrastructure can provide solutions at a reasonable scale. India has launched numerous initiatives such as Aadhaar, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), Rupay, payments bank and India Stack. The Aadhaar scheme has provided a digital identity to about 1.1. Billion Indians based on their fingerprints and retina scans. This has created the foundation for a digital economy and is the largest biometric identity project in the world to have been successfully implemented. The government sanctioned the opening of payment banks, which can hold money but cannot lend, to enhance financial inclusion. In over three years, over 270 million bank accounts were opened, with $10 billion in deposits. Then, RuPay came along, which is a domestic card scheme developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to increase digital financial adoption in the country with its flat processing fees. This makes India one of the only six countries in the world to have their own domestic payment gateway system.