According to a report by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER)-Prosus Centre for Internet and Digital Economy (IPCIDE), India has ranked as the third largest digitalised country among G20 nations after the US and China.
The report stressed that India’s global ranking significantly improves when the full spectrum and scale of digitalisation is taken into account. Digitalisation has made dramatic progress but the way it is being measured globally has not. According to the report, most global indices do not completely capture the path of digitalisation adopted by developing countries.
The report benchmarked the scale and depth of India’s digital transformation with respect to G20 countries as well as for Indian states and Union Territories (UTs), using a new approach called the connect harness innovate-protect-sustain (CHIPS) framework.
The report noted that this approach is better suited for developing countries like India as it captures both the opportunities and risks created by digitalisation. Unlike global indices that focus entirely on the average user, it recognises the scale of the network and breadth of use of technology at the economy-wide level by proposing two separate indices measure digitalisation at the economy-wide level and second at the user-level.
Further, the report added that during G20 presidency, India was recognised as a champion of using digital public infrastructures (DPIs) for large scale delivery of public services. It has issued more than 1.3 billion biometric IDs through the Aadhaar system. Furthermore, more than 83 billion UPI transactions took place in India in the fiscal year 2022-23 (FY23), which is the highest volume of real-time digital payments for a country, followed by China and Brazil.
