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New Delhi, India: Harsh Vardhan Shringla, India’s Chief Coordinator for the G20 Presidency, stated on Saturday that G20 partners concur that a strong digital infrastructure is essential for attaining numerous national goals. “The G20 recognised that having a strong digital infrastructure is essential for achieving many different national objectives. The government may save a lot of money and increase its productivity over time by investing in digital infrastructure,” stated Harsh Shringla, who was speaking on Friday at the Knowledge & Experience Exchange Programmes for Developing Economies of the Global South Conference in Hyderabad.
Shringla emphasised India’s success story in financial inclusion and how it has improved Indians’ lives in his inaugural speech. He also spoke about India’s experience with financial inclusion to attendees from more than 40 nations and regional organisations from the Global South. He referred to PM Modi’s speech at the G20 Finance Ministers as well as Central Bank Governors (FMCBG) meeting, in which he stated that the G20 would concentrate on the most vulnerable people in the globe.
According to him, a strong digital public infrastructure is crucial for attaining many national goals. They include increased productivity, financial inclusion, financial stability, greater innovation and competitiveness, digital sovereignty, and access to services like healthcare, finance, and education. Shringla continued by citing India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) System as an illustration of how the integration of digital payments into public infrastructure has facilitated the development of a thriving digital payments ecosystem.
“India’s digital architecture is unique in that it is open source, owned by public institutions, and supported by the Reserve Bank of India rather than being controlled by private monopolies,” the India-Singapore Initiative, which linked Singapore’s pay now with India’s UPI for cross-border payments, was a significant development that may be imitated in numerous other situations to promote greater interoperability. In the future, agreement and the regulation of interoperability and the globalised system will be crucial to financial systems.
Over the past seven or eight years, one of the government’s top goals in India has been providing lost-mile services to the most vulnerable citizens. Our approach for financial inclusion has just changed its focus from every home to every adult, he continued. The use of smartphones, he claimed, is the foundation of the entire system; therefore, those without them must also be taken into account.
This indicates that India is closing the digital gap by assisting the most marginalised, at-risk groups or those without access to the Internet. Through these activities, people will have access to financial services like credit options and life insurance, among others. According to him, building an equal financial system is a high goal and is essential for attaining growth that is both global and national.
Harsh Shringla also talked about how the world has been touched by the COVID-19 epidemic and the conflict in Ukraine.
