Kochi: Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani on Thursday said that India is taking off in a big way on the digital platform by establishing robust data empowerment architecture. Delivering the keynote address at the two-day #FUTURE Global Digital Summit, he said that the data infrastructure here is for the people, which empower them unlike in the West where the data is in the hands of a few. India will be probably the first country in the world to have data empowerment architecture at the scale of one billion people, he said.
“About 1.2 billion people have Aadhaar. India has about 850 million bank accounts linked to Aadhaar, of which about 550 million are unique bank accounts. This Aadhar-linked bank account is the fundamental basis for direct benefit transfers,” Mr Nilekani noted. “India runs the world’s largest direct benefit transfer system, and so far the government has transferred Rs 100,000 crore into people’s bank accounts using this platform.” He said the system has massive implications for the economy in that it stops money going through multiple layers and its leakage and also corruption.
“The largest programme using this is the LPG programme in which 140 million people get benefits,” he said. The benefit of direct transfer began with subsidies for LPG, pension, scholarships and other entitlements and in the coming years, it will be used for state programmes. Regarding financial inclusion, he said the last four years had seen 300 million new bank accounts opened and its correlation to Aadhar, because it is easier for people to use an electronic KYC (Know Your Customer) and open an instant bank account.
“We are approaching an era where everybody has a digital ID number, a device to communicate with and operate a bank account. This is fundamental digital infrastructure. Mobile, bank account and Aadhar are three pillars of a digital world, and everyone will have all these three things,” he said. He said that post demonetization, the investment in the capital market in the country had gone up double that of the FIIs at 10 billion. About the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Mr Nilekani noted that until October 2016, the month before the demonetisation, the platform was doing 100,000 transactions a month; and by February 2018 it had gone up to 172 million. On GST, he said the strength of the system was in taking a set of disparate technology systems and bringing the entire country into one single network.
