Robust digital infrastructure plays major role in achieving national goals: Shringla at G20

INTERNATIONAL DESK: India’s Chief Coordinator for G20 Presidency Harsh Vardhan Shringla on Saturday said G20 partners agreed that robust digital infrastructure plays a major role in achieving multiple national goals. “The G20 agreed that robust digital infrastructure plays a major role in achieving multiple national goals. Investing in digital infrastructure can bring in significant savings & productivity gains for the government in the long term,” Harsh Shringla said while speaking at the Knowledge & Experience Exchange Programmes For Emerging Economies Of The Global South held in Hyderabad on Friday.

In his inaugural address, Shringla highlighted India’s financial inclusion success story and the way it has transformed the lives of Indians. He also addressed participants from over 40 countries and regional organisations from the Global South on India’s experience in financial inclusion. Recalling PM Modi’s address at the opening session of the meeting of G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (FMCBG), Shringla said that the G20 will focus on the most vulnerable people of the world.

He stated that robust digital public infrastructure plays a major role in achieving multiple national goals. These include economic growth, improved innovation and competition, financial inclusion, productivity gains, financial stability, digital sovereignty, and access to services such as healthcare, credit and education. Shringla further said that India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) System is an example of how digital payments in public infrastructure have allowed an entire ecosystem of digital payments to flourish.

“The unique feature of India’s digital architecture is that it is open source, that it is owned by public institutions and backed by the Reserve Bank of India and not by private monopolies,” The India-Singapore Initiative of linking India’s UPI with Singapore’s pay now for payments across national borders was an important development and could be emulated in many other cases to provide for increasing interoperability Of financial systems in the days to come, agreement and the governance of interoperability and the globalized system is going to be very important.

“In India, delivering lost-mile services to the poorest of the poor has been one of the government’s key priorities over the last seven or eight years. In recent years, we have shifted focus in our financial inclusion strategy from every household to every adult,” he added. He said that the entire system is based on having a smartphone, and people who do not own smartphones also need to be considered.

This means India is reaching out to the most vulnerable, lowest sections, or don’t have Internet access, thus bridging the digital divide. These initiatives will allow citizens to access financial services such as life insurance and credit facilities, among others. He said that an inclusive financial system is among the top priority and is considered instrumental in achieving equitable growth across and within countries.

Further, Harsh Shringla also discussed how the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Ukraine conflict have impacted the world. (ANI)