What India must do to unlock the next phase of its digital economy?

If we want to reap the benefits of the digital economy, we need to make it simple for people to start, grow, and sell enterprises, and we need to have regulations in place that make it easy for people to find new work and update their skills.
 
Businesses in India are often highlighted as examples of companies successfully employing digital technology to solve problems. It’s no surprise that the majority of India’s new unicorns in 2021 were IT companies.
 
India is losing ground in industries that rely heavily on manual labour, and its manufacturing sector is weak due to a lack of technological sophistication. Despite having a significant domestic production base, exports have remained low in industries like autos. ICT and pharma exports, as well as chem exports, have shown remarkable development, though. India is at the forefront of digital payment best practises; the country should leverage this advantage to create digital economy high-value firms that can compete on a global stage.
 
The Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, made the following statement during the Azadi ka Digital Mahotsav: “Primary purpose is to make sure that our digital economy is a trillion-dollar economy — the greatest in the world. This digital economy is either the largest or one of the top two in the world.
 
The market for digital customers in India is massive, and it’s expanding rapidly. With a current user base of over 750 million, the country may see that number rise to over 1.5 billion by the year 2040. India has the greatest per-user mobile data consumption in the world, at 12 GB per month. With nearly 25 million additional smartphone users added each quarter, this is only expected to rise.
 
Smartphone users in India spend an average of 4.7 hours per week on their devices, and the country has more than 1.2 billion mobile wireless connections and approximately 27 billion app downloads in 2021 alone. India’s transition to digital infrastructure is much ahead of that of other developing countries.
 
The expansion of India’s digital consumer market can be attributed to the country’s commercial and public sectors. Digitalization is widely accepted and implemented, as evidenced by the fact that billions of individuals now have a biometric digital identity through Aadhaar and millions of businesses are now operating on a unified platform owing to the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Telecom companies’ aggressive marketing of their data plans has led to a meteoric surge in both data consumption and internet subscriptions.
 
Due to this, low-income states have seen faster growth in internet subscriptions and infrastructure than high-income states have.
 
According to reports released by consulting firm RedSeer at its flagship event Ground Zero 5.0, the size of the Indian consumer digital economy will grow from an estimated $85-$90 billion in 2020 to an estimated $800 billion in 2030. This is according to an article published by the Business Standard.
 
The McKinsey Global Institute conducted a study of more than 600 enterprises and found that digital adoption was patchy across industries. As an example, the likelihood that a digital leader in the top quartile of adopters will centralise digital management is fifteen times higher than among those in the bottom quartile. Two to three times as likely to utilise technology for search engine optimization (SEO), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or customer relationship management than the bottom quartile of businesses (CRM).
 
But if we look closer, we see that a company’s scale is not always a distinction. Smaller businesses often have a leg up on their larger competitors when it comes to adopting innovative technologies. This is especially true when it comes to accepting digital payments, selling products on social media platforms, and using video conferencing to reach and support customers.
 
The laws that India passes in this area need to be up to international standards. This will guarantee the continued availability, accessibility, and safety of the nation’s technological infrastructure and the internet to all citizens. To accelerate the digitalization of government services and provide a clear, comprehensive architecture of digital governance, smart architecture must be intensified. With a focus on the future, Chandrashekhar added, “We will be leaders in emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, blockchain, quantum computing, high-performance computing, cyber security. When it comes to these kinds of technology, we need to be at the forefront.
 
MeitY’s Additional Secretary Rajendra Kumar thinks it’s crucial to put effort into building infrastructure. Also, we must give our attention to cyber security, an area where India has made remarkable strides in the past three years. Tenth in the world for cybersecurity as of right now. As he put it, “that’s an area where we need to keep an eye out for rising risks and counter them.”