Digital public infra to contribute 30-50 bps to medium-term growth

The public digital infrastructure built over the past six-seven years has enhanced economic efficiency and will contribute about 30-50 basis points (bps) to the potential medium-term growth of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to the Economic Survey 2022-23.

The Survey states that the growth effects of the maturation of India’s public digital infrastructure have not been sufficiently understood. The reforms undertaken in recent years are expected to be among the most important drivers of growth in the medium term, it said.

The Survey said the dematerialisation of documents would trigger the next wave of digitalisation. This is expected to happen with the growth of Digital Document Execution (DDE) – the platform for paperless execution and storage of financial contracts. Developed by the National e-Governance Services (NeSL), the platform allows for identity verification for contracts and digital execution using an e-signature.

The government expects the platform to significantly boost the ease of doing business with secure, paperless, and hassle-free contracts.

The Survey highlighted the focus on utilising public digital infrastructure like Aadhaar, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), DigiLocker, and MyGov.

“Transforming welfare through technology, Aadhaar and JAM trinity have revolutionised the universe of state-citizen interaction, enabling targeted delivery of Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT) through 318 central schemes and over 720 state DBT schemes, seamless portability of ration card across States through ‘One Nation One Ration Card’ and national database of unorganised workers ‘eShram portal’,” said the Survey.

Nearly all adults have been enrolled in Aadhaar. The UPI’s share in total digital transactions has grown to 52 per cent in FY22 from 17 per cent in FY19. The number of banks that joined the real-time payment system increased from 35 in December 2017 to over 380 in December 2022.

The government sees the financial cycle turning after a long period of recovery from the pandemic-related shocks. This will be boosted further by the efficiency brought in by digitalisation, as it enables greater formalisation, higher financial inclusion, and more economic opportunities, the Survey said.

“Today, we have a powerful story on digital public infrastructure that is finding global resonance. The increasing digital adoption during Covid-19 in areas like healthcare, agriculture, fintech, education, and skilling indicates that the digital delivery of services in India has a massive potential across economic sectors,” the Survey said.

It added that various initiatives had seen wide user participation. The Unified Mobile Application for New-Age Governance (UMANG) – the platform to access central and state government schemes – had 49 million registered users as of January 16.

In the case of digital financial services, the Survey highlighted that India outperformed with a fintech adoption rate of 87 per cent, substantially higher than the world average of 64 per cent, according to the latest Global FinTech Adoption Index.

The government has focused on Artificial Intelligence and open-source software development, the Survey said. It highlighted Bhashini – the language translation portal that provides 260 API-based AI models for speech-to-text conversion, machine translation, and text-to-speech conversion in 11 Indian languages and English – and OpenForge, the platform for sharing open-source software code of e-governance-related platforms, which had 10,328 users with 2,205 projects as of January 16.