India's Digital Story: Nation Achieved In 9 Years What Should Have Taken 50 Years, Says Amitabh Kant

Kant noted that India managed to digitise its economy in the last 10 decades, and between the 2015-17 period, the country witnessed the creation of over 550 million bank accounts

Kant said that the mobile phone has now become the bank

Source : The Neon Show YouTube

Applauding India’s digital story, G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant said that India underwent the real transformation in digitisation and achieved in 9 years what should have taken it 5 decades to accomplish. 

In conversation with Siddhartha Ahluwalia in The Neon Show, the official shared his insights on the digital transformation of India. Ahluwalia is the host of the founder-focused podcast and Managing Partner of the Neon Venture Fund, a venture capital fund.

Digital India

Kant noted that India managed to digitise its economy in the last 10 decades as today everyone has an Aadhaar. Specifically between the 2015-17 period, he added, the country witnessed the creation of over 550 million bank accounts. 

“Imagine 55 crore bank accounts were opened in India. And then we linked up Aadhaar and mobile numbers with the bank account. And this enabled India to do fast payments,” he stated.

The former NITI Aayog CEO called the mobile phone as the new bank. “So actually this mobile has now become the bank. All Indians do transactions through mobile, this is the bank,” he noted.
He shared that out of the overall global real-time fast payment transactions, 46 per cent are done by India. “So we're very far advanced in digitisation. What has happened in the last 10 years is that we have technologically not leapfrogged but pole vaulted and once you have created this infrastructure, people started doing fast payments,” he pointed out.

Role Of Start-Ups

Elaborating on the role of start-ups in the Indian economy’s growth, he said that multiple start-ups emerged in recent years dealing in credit, stock market, insurance, etc, and made these segments accessible for the public. 

“You had a whole range of start-ups who started giving credit based on payment history, then you had another set of start-ups which started actually taking the stock market to rural areas. If you look at Zerodha, Groww, Upstox, they went to Tier 2, and Tier 3 cities. And then you had another set of companies, young start-ups, which started giving insurance. Today in 30 seconds to 1 minute, you can take an insurance policy, which in my time, when I was young, used to take me 6-7 months. You can open a bank account in 30 sec, do a stock transaction in 30 sec. So India has really jumped in digitisation,” he explained. 

Quoting the Bank of International Settlements, he said that India managed to achieve in 9 years the kind of digital transformation that should have taken the country 50 years to achieve. He lauded the country for this development saying ‘that is the digital story’.