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India is going from many micro economies to a single mega economy because of DPIs: Nilekani


Infosys Chairman and Aadhaar founder Nandan Nilekani remarked on August 27 that India's digital public infrastructure, including Aadhaar, the unified payments interface, digilocker, and others, are consolidating the country's disparate informal sector businesses into a single mega economy.


"What is fundamentally happening is India is going from multiple set of micro-economies to a single mega economy. This is the trend of the next 20 years. This has been solved by a new way of solving problems called digital public infrastructure which solves problems with technology at the population scale," Nilekani said at the B20 Summit in Delhi.


"Whenever you use a digital platform, it creates data. India has invented a unique idea of how individuals and companies can use their own data footprint to monetise it. This data footprint is their digital capital. And individuals can use digital capital to get ahead in life. This concept doesn't exist anywhere in the world," he added.


While the rest of the world struggles to strike a balance between innovation and regulation, the seasoned IT executive claims that India has already done so by adopting a participatory form of data governance and architecture.


Nilekani used a slew of statistics about DPIs to demonstrate their widespread adoption across India. He mentioned that during Covid, $4.5 billion was sent to the bank accounts of 150 million Indian individuals via DPIs, and that currently, 700 million Indians have their Aadhaar numbers linked to their bank accounts.


Over 9.66 billion transactions are conducted on the UPI network every month, making it the most important payment system in the world, and currently, 1.3 billion people utilize Aadhaar to conduct 80 million identity authentication transactions every day.


"India did in 9 years what would have taken 47 years by traditional means. We went from being one of the most unbanked countries to most financially inclusive countries," said Nilekani.


"All of this wouldn't have been possible without the $250 billion IT services industry. To complement it, we have an extraordinary startup ecosystem. In 2016, we had 1,000 startups. Now we have 1 lakh. It is not a linear growth of 10 percent but a 10x growth," he added.


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