Every Digits Counts… Including Yours.

-- Sunoj Nambiar, Director of Indiansinkuwait.com

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Recently, I happened to see a video clip of German Minister 'Volker Wissing' doing a shopping at one of the vegetable market in New Delhi. After buying some vegetable, the Minister made the payment to the street vendor using UPI payment on his mobile phone. It was part of testing India's digital payment facilities. German Embassy in New Delhi shared the video on its X (formerly known as Twitter) platform with the text "One of India’s success story is digital infrastructure".

Watching that video reminded me of how I struggled to do shopping during the initial days of my vacation to India. People looked at me like nuts when I said I don’t have GPay!!! and that too in a Tier 2 city. I was forced to open a new bank account with my India phone number to activate UPI on my phone as my NRI account was linked to my Kuwait sim.

No doubt, this mobile based payment system UPI or the Unified Payments Interface is one of the major invention India made in recent years towards the growth of our digital economy.

You can witness that now a days digital payments has been adopted by everyone in India be it a local street vendor or a big showroom. It makes our shopping so convenient such that we don’t have to worry about carrying cash in our wallet or search for an ATM in remote places.

I had a chance to talk to one of the street vendor in my town who sells evening snacks including 'Pani Puri' and such. From his talks, the high school educated man explains how he keeps track of his income and expense by looking at the transaction history after adopting the digital payments for the past one year. This also helped him to put his savings in the formal economy, ie bank account, which he never used earlier.

Adoption of digital payment and formal banking economy also helps these street vendors with many other benefits such as recently launched PM SVANidhi scheme, which spares them from clutches of money lenders, and many other.

UPI payment system, coupled with Aadhaar card and zero-balance bank accounts Jan Dhan Yojana, bought millions of Indians to the formal economy. By facilitating instant and hassle-free transactions, it helped in bringing millions of individuals, who were not part of the system earlier, into the formal banking system.

A recent news article which struck me was that the India’s current digital public infrastructure (DPI) landscape has provided 40 per cent of the 1.2 billion population access to banking facilities. The digital push by the government have not just impacted governance but also the private sector, especially start-ups. The popularity of UPI in the e-commerce space is unbelievable.

Digital payments has transformed the way we Indians transact, empowering millions and driving economic growth. As we all start shifting towards the digital economy, not only the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSME) retailers are benefitting from their business, but also they are becoming part of India's formal economy.

Interesting fact is that we NRIs also have something to cheer about in this digital transformation. Recently in a conversation with a friend, I was impressed by knowing that he pay himself even for the grocery shopping of his parents living in India using UPI. He order the weekly grocery for his parents from the nearby grocery shop in Maharashtra where his parents are living and he pay to the grocer by GPay! How convenient it is! There are some parents who even pay their daughters expenses in India through Google pay from Kuwait. This not only makes our life comfortable but also makes every digit of ours count and contributes towards the economic growth of our country.

This resounding success story of digital payments not only streamlined our lives, but also positioned India as a pioneer in the digital payments world. The UPI is already live in Singapore, Bhutan and the UAE for Indian tourists to use at selected merchants and tourist sites. In Kuwait also, officials from the National Payments Corporation of India had few discussions with KNeT, Ministry of Finance and Central bank of Kuwait on E payment solutions and digital payment infrastructure. Hope this discussion will yield some fruitful results in the near future.

As the India government's persistent effort to digitalize the Indian economy and make the entire population participate in the economic growth continues, India will eventually become a $5-trillion economy. The only question is if that will happen sooner rather than later.

Sunoj Nambiar, Director of Indiansinkuwait.com