Economic Survey 2023: Digital public infrastructure can add up to 100 bps to GDP growth rate

IMF forecasts show an acceleration in India's GDP growth rate, says CEA V Anantha Nageswaran.

India's digital public infrastructure (DPI) can add around 60-100 basis points (bps) to the country’s potential GDP growth rate and there is a lot of justified optimism around it, said chief economic advisor V Anantha Nageswaran while presenting the Economic Survey of 2023.

“There is lots of justified optimism about India's digital public infrastructure. The digital infrastructure can help the hitherto excluded sections get a fair shot at accessing national and international markets,” Nageswaran said on Tuesday.

DPI are solutions and systems that enable the provision of essential society-wide functions and services in the public and private sectors. This includes digital forms of identification and verification, civil registration, payment (digital transactions and money transfers), data exchange, and information systems. DPI was introduced in India in 2009 when Aadhaar was first launched.

The bouquet of digital public infrastructure products like e-rupi, e-way bill, and TReDS for MSMEs have ensured real value for money to consumers while reducing the compliance burden for producers, the economic survey noted.

“Now with the vision of a $1 trillion digital economy by 2025, the government is marching towards providing more and more e-governance-based services,” The Economic Survey said.

How India has created and harnessed its DPI is capturing the attention of many nations globally, the Economic Survey said.
“Low-cost accessibility (Aadhaar), the success of citizen-centric services like Unified Payments Interface (UPI), large-scale adoption and reach (DigiLocker, MyGov), and the vaccine journey through Co-Win are important and successful milestones in India’s public digital infrastructure journey,” it said.

The government has so far introduced several initiatives under the umbrella of digital public goods or infrastructure, the economic survey highlighted.

“The next logical step was to make major government services available digitally…‘MyScheme’ is an e-Marketplace for schemes where users can look for suitable schemes based on their eligibility,” the Survey said.

As on January 16, 2023, more than 181 Central and State/UT government schemes across 14 diverse categories have been hosted on the portal.

To reduce the search cost for the commoners, the government launched the Unified Mobile Application for New-Age Governance (UMANG), which enables citizens to access e-Government services offered by the Central and State Governments in various sectors such as agriculture, education, health, housing, employees, pensioners, and students’ welfare, the Public Distribution System, and others.
Today, over Over 4.9 crore users are registered and benefiting from services on UMANG.

“Until 16 January 2023, UMANG catered to about 21,869 services (1,672 Central and State government services and 20197 Bill Payment services) under 310+ departments of Central Government and departments of 34 States/UTs,” the survey noted.

In order to promote open collaborative software development of e-governance applications, a platform called OpenForge has been developed, the Survey noted.

"Through OpenForge, the use of open-source software and sharing and reuse of e-governance-related source code is promoted. As on 16 January 2023, there are 10,328 users on the platform, with 2,205 projects 14," it said.