‘Digital public infra helps in adoption at the bottom of the pyramid’

Indians are going digital like never before, whether it’s the Jio effect or in general an economy waiting to happen, the growth and innovation is skyscraping. The country’s digital innovation has brought 1.3 billion Indians into the digital economy.

At e4mTechmanch 2023, Dr. Arvind Gupta, Co-founder & Head, Digital India Foundation, shed light on how the burgeoning digital economy is driving growth in the world of internet and eCommerce. “We were 155th on data consumption and cost once, and today we have the lowest cost of data in the world and the highest data consumption per capita. When our government took over in 2014, we were close to 15 crore internet connections, today we are close to 90 crores,” he said.

When Digital India Foundation started building the digital architecture, they focussed on the core of India’s income pyramid, the deprived because these were the people who occupied the maximum area on the bottom of the pyramid of India’s class divide.

Further, India is making digital infrastructure as public goods, like ONDC is not free but it is non-rent seeking, where it is sustainable and has equitability in building the platform. It is in a way equally available to startups, to corporates, to businesses to fintechs, to banks and to the government, he said.

India is also now a mobile-first economy that has experienced an addition of 200 mobiles per year. From two mobile assembling and manufacturing plants in India to 272 in 2022, the digital landscape in India has expanded in length and in breadth.

The DIF executive shared how today even tier two and three city entrepreneurs are more comfortable with UPI. The main reason behind this shift from cash to UPI is that they can price their product to even Rs 12.5. Whereas earlier, they were stuck between pricing their product to either Rs 15 or Rs 20.

“The digital public infrastructure makes technology simpler for the consumer and that is the game changer that we have made. That is how you get adoption at the bottom of the pyramid,” Gupta said.

ONDC, as a vision, is exactly modelled on a population-scale intervention like the UPI to democratise digital commerce in India. When small business owners face stiff competition from e-commerce giants, ONDC will provide a platform to such SMEs to scale their operations.

Another digital revolution was the FASTag for all tolls in India. Due to this collection the collection rose up by 46 percent to USD six billion in 2022, from 4.6 billion in 2021. Today 98 per cent of Indians use FASTag because it saves their time and cost, he added.

“Lessons learnt from India’s digital story is that all success is happening because of open innovation, speed, scale, agile policies and digital infrastructure being at par with physical and social infrastructure.”

Gupta concluded, “While the Silicon Valley companies innovate for the top billion, you, me and India as a whole will innovate for the next seven billion of the world.”