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This is evidenced by the fact that the country’s digital payments railroad the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) crossed 6821.26 million transactions in the first 17 days of January alone this year.
The Jan Dhan scheme has led to the creation of 51.11 crore accounts with a total deposit of Rs 2.08 lakh crore. Sitharaman on Thursday said direct benefit transfer of Rs 34 lakh crore from the Government using PM Jan Dhan accounts has led to savings of Rs 2.7 lakh crore for the Government.
“This has been realised through avoidance of leakages. The savings have helped in providing more funds for Garib Kalyan,” she said.
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India is the largest data market with 900 million internet users as of December last year. The country has more than 900 million smartphone users and 250 million feature phone users. Aadhaar, India’s foundational identity programme, has enrolled more than 139 crore people to date, which covers almost all of India’s population.
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India’s DPI received a fillip due to the trinity of Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and mobiles. It has increased access and inclusion for the country’s poor. It is also laying the foundation for innovation in the areas of e-commerce and credit enablement. While the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce facilitated 4.7 million transactions in November last year, it is aiming for up to eight million monthly transactions towards the end of this year.
Hailed globally, India’s DPI, are now also trying to fix issues related to sustainability and artificial intelligence computing capacity.
Sitharaman in last year’s budget had said that in agriculture, geo-referencing has been completed for 75% of the villages in the country. A digital crop survey has been launched on a pilot basis in 12 States. In addition, support registries such as crop registries, an agri data exchange, a consent manager, a sand box, and a Unified Farmer Service Interface (UFSI) have also been developed.