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India is moving from being an "offline, informal, low-productivity set of micro economies to a single online, formal, high-productivity, mega economy,” said Nilekani who was founder chairman of the Aadhaar project speaking at an event in New Delhi.
“India’s ‘techade’ is a different model of growth. Nobody has seen this model so they can’t understand it. This is really going to lead to much more growth, much more equity because everybody is included, an opportunity for every Indian.”
He said India has the "DPI advantage” in a world that is growing hotter, older, and more geopolitically fraught. “The whole globalisation that we saw for 40 years is now going through a lot of challenges,” he said, but India’s advantages as a democratic country and a young country with a high growth rate are well known.
The pace of DPIs has also changed, he said, referring to the time taken for Aadhaar coverage and UPI transactions to reach population scale. “Technology and DPI accelerated financial inclusion and allowed us to go from 80% of people not having bank accounts to 80% of the people having bank accounts in a matter of nine years. And then, in six years, India went from a cash economy to the world's largest platform for digital payments,” he said.
Further, Nilekani said that data created as a "byproduct" of DPI is "digital capital" that people can convert into other forms of capital, which improves lives. Businesses and individuals having access to digital capital is going to “turbo-charge the economy,” he added.
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Artificial intelligence will only accelerate this, he said, and India's AI strategy will use the available differentiated data to solve challenges.
“AI will only accelerate this whole thing because in AI, compute is going to be a commodity, models are going to be a commodity, the only thing that will differentiate you is data,” he said. “So, differentiated data is going to be at the heart of it. And I think India is going to have an AI strategy which will use all the models out there" Using the differentiated data we have can actually solve challenges for India, he added.