Inclusive digital public infrastructure by design, accelerated development process: Sitharaman

Developing and harnessing digital public infrastructure, which is inclusive by design, can help countries speed up their development processes and generate huge benefits, said Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

The minister also told a conference here that DPI or Digital Public Infrastructure has transferred enormous transformational potential by continuously facilitating innovations by engaging the government and the private sector. “The development and harnessing of IPRs indeed sets in motion a virtuous cycle, unceasingly delivering huge benefits for countries to speed up development processes,” he said on Friday while addressing “Digital Public Infrastructure: Accumulation of Benefits” Organized by International Monetary Fund.

The benefits of DPI will go a long way in strengthening the effort to achieve strong, inclusive, resilient and sustainable economic growth, he said.

Sitharaman said the cases show that the potential for IPR to contribute to the public and private sectors is enormous and can transform the development trajectory of countries even in difficult times.

“In India, over the past two years, we have seen how DPI can contribute to targeted, fast, efficient and inclusive service delivery through innovative methods developed by public and private sector initiatives,” he said.

India’s building blocks approach and digital identity which is digital payments and concept-based data sharing has helped us “improve our governance, make it easy to do business and make life easier for our people,” he said. .

Harnessing the potential of identity and payments through IPR, India has opened a record 462.5 million low-cost bank accounts with 56 percent of account holders women, the finance minister said.

“This has allowed us to transform government service delivery by building the world’s largest direct benefit transfer system or an IPR-based direct benefit transfer system that has helped around 615 million people who received $322 billion directly into their accounts, leading to overall savings. of more than $27 billion in key central government services and schemes,” he said.

DPI has some inherent features, such as interoperability, openness, low-cost access and transparency, and this makes it inclusive by design, Sitharaman said. “This has helped and is helping India to address the various challenges of the digital divide. The scalability feature of our DPI makes investments cheap and therefore beneficial to the end user as cost can be minimized or access can be done all for free. This is pro-inclusion,” he said.

DPI interoperability, as in the case of India, allows the development of multiple solutions to promote inclusion, the minister said.

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said public digital infrastructure, with its building blocks being public and private, can greatly accelerate development by making the inaccessible accessible. It also allows the excluded to be included and does so in a very simple and intuitive way, she said at the conference.

“We learn that we have a role to play in standards and interoperability because we can speed up access for countries to what others have done. In the last two years, we have engaged with countries to learn from India, but also to innovate on their own,” he said.

“Our main job at this institution is to provide employment and growth opportunities for people to reach their potential…and this is the most effective inclusion accelerator there is,” Georgieva said.

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani said digital public infrastructure is a philosophy and a belief that technology can truly transform society, improve lives, enable financial inclusion and drive economic growth in a more equitable way.

“One of the reasons for India’s success is political will. I think in India, Prime Minister Modi, Finance Minister Sitharaman are what I would call Digital Prime Ministers. In other words, when they look at a public policy issue, they say, can we do this digitally? And that’s how companies think about how to be digital first,” he said. “Now, we have governments running like this. That is a big part of the success of the Indian model,” said Nilekani.

The IPR moment has arrived and “I can feel it in every meeting and every conversation,” he said, adding that “I think we all have a collective goal of 50 countries implementing IPR in five years and I am confident that we will achieve that.”

read all latest news from india here

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)