The International Monetary Fund, in its report, has said that India’s strong digital infrastructure was able to quickly provide support to an impressive share of poor households during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo Source: United Nations
New Delhi, April 6: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) praised India’s efforts on developing a world-class digital public infrastructure (DPI) to support its sustainable development goals. The financial agency said that other countries embarking on their own digital transformation can seek inspiration from India’s journey.
A working paper, titled ‘Stacking up the Benefits Lessons from India’s Digital Journey,’ by IMF, credits India’s building block approach and focus on supporting innovation for the success of its DPI. The building block approach involves identifying a minimal common core to solve a set of problems.
The paper said that using a digital backbone allowed India to scale its vaccine delivery quickly and overcome challenges such as large-scale internal migration. The technology underlying CoWIN, a digital platform developed by India to capture the Covid-19 vaccination programme has been deployed in Indonesia, Philippines, Sri Lank and Jamaica to help facilitate their vaccination programmes.
The paper said that demonetization led to greater use of other forms of payment, including the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). It said that Aadhaar helped facilitate the transfer of social safety net payments directly from the government treasury’s accounts to beneficiaries’ bank accounts, helping to reduce leakages, curb corruption, and providing a tool to effectively reach households to increase coverage.
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