Policymaking For A $5 Trillion Economy

India seems to be at a crossroads. Good policymaking and timely intervention from the government will take it to the $5 trillion goal earlier than expected and result in economic prosperity for all. On the other hand, delay and reactionary stopgap measures could blow up the current slowdown in certain sectors, an economy-wide phenomenon, which could result in massive setbacks in growth achieved thus far, analyses TEAM INCLUSION

In the backdrop of falling automobile sales, manufacturing output dipping across various sectors and even sunrise sectors like FinTech facing the regulatory onslaught, economists, policymakers and bureaucrats are focusing on realising the goal of a $1 trillion digital economy out of the $5 trillion target set by the finance minister. For this to happen, the financial technologies sector is going to play a catalytic role. But, the road isn’t always easy with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) acting as both a competitor in the market and the regulator at the same time.

“We have no idea if NPCI is a service provider or a regulator. You can’t have a regulator that’s also competing in the market. The entire FinTech dream was the Aadhaar dream. Now even that’s in danger after the recent judicial activism. There is a need for wider consultation on important issues such as these and a sociological angle is very important to consider,” said Sameer Kochhar, Chairman, SKOCH Group.

Agreeing with the assertion, Ravi Rajagopalan, Founder & CEO, Empays Payment Systems, said that as a FinTech entrepreneur, there are both positives and negatives of working in India but the bottlenecks in policymaking must be removed and grey areas need to be reduced for the industry to flourish.

These grey areas come in many forms. For a decade, there was a consistent confusion about the legal status of Aadhaar and what can and cannot be done with the public good that forms the basis of the ever-important India Stack. With the recent SC judgement outlawing certain use cases such as e-KYCs, business models are under threat.

Even now there’s a need to be more consultative and there needs to be a consistent plan for people manning the new-age systems, said Tanuj Bhojwani, a volunteer with iSPIRT, a think-tank, which works on the Aadhaar stack.