Stressing the use of digitisation for rapid development, the President of the 78th session of the UN General Assembly, Dennis Francis, lavished praise on India for its work in this direction, which has lifted 800 million out of poverty in the last 5-6 years.
He highlighted how people in rural areas of India, are able to make payments and pay bills just on the touch of a smartphone.
“Providing the basis to rapid development, such as through digitalisation. Take, for example, the case of India…India has been able to lift 800 million people out of poverty over the last 5-6 years simply by the use of smartphones,” Francis said during his lecture at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN on the topic of ‘Accelerating progress towards Zero Hunger for the current and future generations.’
Francis emphasised the high internet penetration in India as a major factor why India has been able to benefit but not many other countries of the Global South. “Rural farmers in India who never had a relationship with the banking system, are now able to transact all their businesses on their smartphone. They pay their bills, they receive payments for orders. 800 million people lifted out of poverty. Because there is a high level of internet penetration in India, almost everyone has a cellphone,” he said.
“That is not the case in many parts of the Global South. So, there has to be equity demands, there has to be some effort, initiative to address this inequality as an initial step in negotiating the global framework for digitalisation,” the UNGA President added.
Notably, digitisation has been one of the main focuses of the Narendra Modi government in the last 10 years. A rapid rise has been witnessed in digital payment transactions in the country in the last decade and UPI has emerged as a major contributor to it.
PM Modi has promoted the use of digitisation through the JAM initiative — Jan Dhan, Aadhar, and Mobile. Under this, people have been encouraged to open their bank accounts and every account has been linked with Aadhaar.
This has helped in connecting people across the country, even in the rural areas with various government schemes and the social benefit payments reaching directly into the ban account of people.
Reacting to UNGA president Dennis Francis’s statement praising India for moving 80 crore people out of poverty, BJP leader and former Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that Francis has presented an example of transformation in India during the last ten years.
The Union Minister mentioned the statistics and said that PM Modi through his digital government policies has helped 80 crore people to come out of poverty and 25 crore people from multi-dimensional poverty.
“He gave the example of transformation in India in these 10 years and PM Modi and said that every country should form policies like these to take their poor forward. He also said that this change in the lives of 80 crore people is due to technology and mobile phones. 80 crore people came out of poverty and 25 crore out of multi-dimensional due to the efforts made by PM Modi.
Before 2014, the narrative of the Government of India before the world was that the government was very dysfunctional, the government system was very leaky and corrupt, that banking inclusion in India was just for the rich and middle class, and the poor were disconnected from the banking system,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
“Internet connectivity was available to only 17 crore people before 2014, so there was a digital exclusion framework. After 2014, PM Modi turned this 17 crore internet connection into 90 crore in 10 years. 14 crore people had bank accounts, today 52 crore people have bank accounts. So, combining all of these we have seen that 25 crore people have come out of multidimensional poverty and during COVID 80 crore people were provided ration and 200 crore vaccination was administered with the help of technology…” he added further.
“Former UK PM Tony Blair said that other countries must also follow India’s footsteps,” he highlighted.
