India's accomplishments in digital financial infrastructure are miraculous: Sinha.

Financial Services

India's accomplishments in digital financial infrastructure are miraculous: Sinha.

India's accomplishments in digital financial infrastructure are miraculous: Sinha.

The government has made a well mapped-out provision for establishing digital financial infrastructure or digital public goods in the country in the form of Aadhaar, provision of universal bank accounts, and Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Member of Parliament Jayant Sinha said on Friday.

He said the way the country has established the digital financial infrastructure over the past seven-eight years is nothing short of a miracle.

“The government has done a very sophisticated and well mapped-out provision of digital financial infrastructure or digital public goods, which includes Aadhaar, provision of universal bank accounts and UPI payment system,” Sinha, who heads the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance said on Friday.

''I don't think any other country, except China, could match (in terms of establishing digital financial infrastructure) what we have accomplished and the speed and the volume in which it's been done,” Sinha said.

The digital public goods have unleashed the innovations which have resulted in many unicorns in the country and also customers getting the various new services.

He said going forward the digital public goods that the country has developed will enable it to digitize other sectors of the economy in an equally revolutionary way.

Speaking on Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), he said it will enable the country to open up commerce in a way that has not been possible in other countries.

“ONDC is going to be more revolutionary than UPI. It will enable us to open up e-commerce in a way that we have not seen anywhere else in the world,” Sinha added.

Digital finance has the potential to transform the emerging market and advanced economies alike. India's approach rests on the principle of providing digital financial infrastructure as a public good. It offers an important case study where the results are relevant and applicable for all economies, irrespective of their stage of development. The provision of a national digital biometric identity to all residents has effectively granted them broad access to the banking system. The development of a real-time payment system platform has brought efficiencies to retail customers and small-scale transactions. By providing cheap and instantaneous payment services to ordinary citizens, the design of the Indian payment system challenges the business case for standalone private payment systems.

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