A video recap of the India’s Digital “Turn?” Unconference can be found below. That dialogue with experts informed many of our recommendations presented in this research report. At the event, featured Catalysts-representatives from the global investment community, a philanthropic foundation, India’s leading e-commerce platform, the investment promotion agency of the Government of India, and a global pharmaceutical firm-led discussions on the structural and infrastructural changes required in the near, medium, and long term for India to realize its digital ambitions. We posed such questions at the India’s Digital “Turn?” Unconference, an open-forum interactive event in February 2020, which was informed and inspired by this research. Can digital uptake be a lever for rebuilding economic momentum and job growth, which will be sorely needed as India attempts to recover from the downturn in the wake of COVID-19? To be sure, this dichotomy isn’t unique to India large swaths of the digital south are faced with the same inclusion paradox. This brings us to the central theme of this report: the progress that India has experienced in its digital inclusion has not, in any meaningful way, translated into inclusion in the form of economic opportunities. All of these pointed to the potential for a “digital dividend.” With or without the COVID shock, the moment is now for India to forge a pathway for Indians to translate the recent surge in digital uptake and accompanying data affluence into economic well-being and a higher quality of life in this decade. Putting aside the enormous disruptions caused by the pandemic, India, like several economies of the “digital south,” has been experiencing a confluence of several trends: urbanization, a youthful demographic bulge, and the fierce urgency of overcoming immediate physical obstacles to progress. The pre-COVID moment was ripe with possibility. The COVID-19 shock has rendered this aspiration all the more bold. It is all but true that “Indians will be data-rich before they become economically rich.” India, furthermore, is unique in its stated aim of achieving a $1 trillion digital economy by 2025, with its digital economy expected to account for a fifth of its overall goal of transforming into a $5 trillion economy over the next five years. India is already the second-largest internet market, behind China its 600 million active internet users have been consuming nearly three times as much data on their phones as Americans. The IndiaStack digital infrastructure-built on the foundations of Aadhaar, “the world’s largest biometric identity,” introduced in 2009 and issued to over 1.25 billion Indians-is, for example, a sui generis accomplishment.Įqually admirable are the sheer size and scale of India’s digital consumption and economic ambitions. This lack of readiness is in spite of India’s many recent advances and achievements in bringing digital identity, financial inclusion, and internet access to the masses and deploying the best available technologies to advance the well-being of its citizens. Of the countries studied, India fared the poorest. In our recent research on readiness for remote work, in light of lockdowns worldwide, we scored 42 countries on several crucial dimensions: the robustness of key platforms essential to business continuity (technology-mediated remote work, e-commerce, digital media, and digital foundations) the proliferation of digital payments to facilitate transactions and the resilience of internet infrastructure to traffic surges. India’s state of readiness for socially distant work and business continuity leaves much to be desired.
A phased reopening at the end of May has left the country in the difficult position of fielding a large and growing outbreak while its fragile healthcare system is being pushed to the brink. India’s already precarious economic situation at the start of 2020-hobbled as the country was by a combination of lagged knock-on effects of ill-conceived policies like demonetization and a lack of bold ideas in planning for the future-was only exacerbated by one of the most stringent global lockdowns in the second half of March, which brought the economy to a virtual standstill and put over a fourth of the labor force out of work. As of this writing, the novel coronavirus has infected 10 million people globally, claimed the lives of nearly 500,000, and impacted the livelihoods of hundreds of millions, as countries struggle with the grim calculus involved in protecting both public health and economic health.
The “great lockdown” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has plunged the global economy into the worst economic downturn since the great depression.
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