Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman, Infosys Technologies, said on Saturday that India’s Account Aggregator Network (AAN) and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) would together be driving future growth in the country. These were the two big things happening that could help in job creation in the country, he said.
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ONDC disaggregates e-commerce while the account aggregator democratised credit and this would give small businesses access to credit and drive future e-commerce, Nilekani said at the Pune TIECON 2022 on Saturday.
One of the biggest challenges facing the country was job creation and India would have to create jobs through domestic activity unlike China’s export and manufacturing-led growth, he said. This would require millions of small businesses to do well and if 10 million small businesses did well and each employed two persons, that would mean 20 million jobs created, so the job creation model for India would have to be different, Nilekani suggested. Small businesses would need access to credit and market linkages which would come from ONDC and AAN and enable them to create jobs.
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“We are going to see more companies build solutions, apps around ONDC, he said. He saw this as an opportunity to build great companies and lots of companies were already building solutions for Bharat. They were building products and solutions, not for the top 20 million people in metros, but for the 200 million people living in small towns who were extremely aspirational and wanted to use technology, he said.
It would be similar to what happened with Aadhaar, which created a generation of companies with millions of customers such as the largest broking company Zerodha, mega consumer payment apps Phone Pe, Paytm and BharatPe driven by UPI and also helped Reliance Jio get a million customers in one day and 100 million customers within six months.
“We are finally now seeing the impact of digital India on the lives of people and all this was helping people lead a better life, improving productivity and making it more convenient. It is creating fertile ground for innovation,” Nilekani said. The basic rails were provided by the government and all innovations would be built on this by the entrepreneurs, he said. India is in the sweet spot and the next decade will be that of India and it is way up there in everybody’s mind, Nilekani said. Digital India was a dramatic and ambitious attempt to create a digital-first economy and society and was being used to improve the life of people in the country, he said. Nilekani said 1.3 billion people were using Aadhaar regularly doing 50 million authentications a day, five million KYCs a day, 260 million UPI users making digital payments, there were 150 million people using Aadhaar-enabled payments systems to withdraw money from bank accounts which meant that there were 400 million people were some form of digital transactions.