Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday said that India’s digital public infrastructure offers scalable, secure and inclusive solutions for global challenges.
Addressing the G20 Digital Economy Ministers meeting in Bengaluru virtually, the Prime Minister said that India is an incredibly diverse country.
“We can build an entire ecosystem for technology based solutions to challenges faced by humanity,” he said.
“We have dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects. It is home to every religion in the world and innumerable cultural practices. From ancient traditions to the latest technologies India has something for everyone. With such diversity, India is an ideal testing lab for solutions,” he said.
“We are building Bhashini, an AI powered language translation platform that will support digital inclusion in all the diverse languages of India,” the Prime Minister said.
“The country’s digital transformation over the last nine years is unprecedented. It all started with the launch of digital India initiative in 2015 and is powered by an unshakable belief in innovation. It is driven by our commitment to speedy implementation and motivated by our spirit of inclusion leaving no one behind,” he said.
The scale, speed and scope of this transformation is beyond imagination. Today India has over 850 million internet users enjoying some of the cheapest data costs in the world. We have leveraged technology to transform governance to make it more appreciating, inclusive, faster and transparent, he added.
“Our unique digital identity platform Aadhaar covers more than 1.3 billion of our people. We have used the power of ‘JAN’ Trinity. Jan Dhan bank account, Aadhar and mobile to revolutionise financial inclusion in India,” he stated.
Every month nearly 10 billion transactions are made via UPI, our instant payment system. More than 45 per cent of global real time payments happen in India. Direct benefit transfer system of the government is plugging leakages and has saved over 33 billion dollars, Prime Minister Modi said.
The CoWin portal supported the country’s Covid vaccination drive and helped in delivery of 2 billion vaccine doses along with digitally verifiable certificates, he added.
“The Gati Shakti platform uses technology and special planning to map infrastructure and logistics. It is assisting in planning, reducing cost and encouraging speed of delivery. Our online public procurement programme in the government e-market place has brought transparency and probity into the process,” he said.
The open network for Digital commerce is democratising e-commerce. Wholly-digitised taxation systems are promoting transparency and e-governance. Bengaluru is a city that is home to science, technology and spirit of entrepreneurship. There is no better place than Bengaluru to discuss the digital economy, he added.
