Digital infra cut India’s financial inclusion journey to 6 yrs from projected 47 years, says G20 doc

New Delhi, Sep 8 (Agency) India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) has helped India achieve financial inclusion in six years, compared to what would have taken about half a century, a G20 document prepared by the World Bank has said.This G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) document has been prepared by the World Bank as an implementing partner of GPFI with guidance and inputs from the G20 India Presidency, represented by the Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).Lauding the transformative impact of DPIs in India over the past decade, the G20 document said that the JAM Trinity (Jan Dhan, Aadhar, and Mobile) propelled the financial inclusion rate from 25% in 2008 to over 80% of adults in the last 6 years.

The document released ahead of the G20 Leadership Summit in New Delhi said that India has, in the last decade, built one of the world’s largest digital government-to-person (G2P) architectures, leveraging DPI.Further, the architecture has supported transfers amounting to about $361 billion directly to beneficiaries from 53 central government ministries through 312 key schemes.”As of March 2022, this had resulted in a total savings of $33 billion, equivalent to nearly 1.14% of GDP,” as per the document.It underlined the runaway success of the unified Payment Interface (UPI) and said that the total value of UPI transactions in FY23 was nearly 50% of India’s nominal GDP.It further said that the DPI in India has also enhanced efficiency for private organisations through reductions in complexity, cost, and time taken for business operations.

Noting digital public infrastructure’s potential added value for the private sector, the document said that even some NBFCs have enabled 8pc higher conversion rate in SME lending, a 65pc savings in depreciation costs, and 66pc reduction in costs related to fraud detection.According to industry estimates, banks’ costs of on-boarding customers in India have decreased from $23 to $0.1 with the use of DPI.The key document said that India Stack has digitised and simplified KYC (know your customer) procedures, lowering costs for banks and financial institutions.”The decrease in costs made lower-income clients more attractive to service and generated profits to develop new products,” an official release said, quoting the G20 document.