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India has developed a world-class digital public infrastructure (DPI) to support its sustainable development goals with its journey having lessons for other countries embarking on their own digital transformation, IMF has said in a working paper, noting that digitalization has supported formalization of India ecoonomy and Aadhaar has helped in direct transfer of payments to beneficiaries while reducing leakages.

In a news item as published on the website of ANI, the working paper ‘Stacking up the Benefits Lessons from India ‘s Digital Journey’ lauds Indian government’s catalytic role, acting as an anchor client and establishing institutions to ensure continuity in the country.

The working paper said that using this digital infrastructure, India, was able to quickly provide support to an impressive share of poor households during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The IMF 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 Lanka and Jamaica to help facilitate their vaccination programmes.
The paper lauded Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) launched by the Narendra Modi government and said sound policies led to a competitive, open, and affordable telecommunications market and lowering of cost of mobile data by 90 percent lead to a jump in data usage.
The paper said that demonetization led to greater use of other forms of payment, including the UPI.
It said 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.