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Bill Gates Praises India's Digital Infrastructure

CIO Insider Team | Thursday, 2 March, 2023
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Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was all praise for India's digital infrastructure and lauded the country for laying a strong foundation that provides room for innovation and applications.

"No country has done more comprehensive platform than India,” Gates says at a G20 session on Building Resilient and Inclusive Economies - The Promise of Digital Public Infrastructure in New Delhi.

He addressed the gathering in the presence of India's Minister of Electronics & Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw and says it was India's efforts in providing digital identity that enabled the country to offer services like finance.

Vaishnaw says, "Because of the pioneering investments, India was in the lead in getting out payments through the pandemic.”

According to Vaishnaw the digital infrastructure, achieving the number of bank accounts that India has today would have taken 50 years. The digital payments infrastructure allows the Gates Foundation to make payments to workers in the field, enabling the adoption of innovation across sectors, including agriculture.

Recently, UPI partnered with its equivalent network in Singapore called PayNow, developed by the Association of Banks.

Vaishnaw says, “India has provided solutions that can be scaled across the population of a country. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), launched in 2016, as an example of India's success."

“On an annualized basis, UPI does $1.5 trillion worth of transactions. The average settlement time is only two seconds,” says Vaishnaw.

Recently, UPI partnered with its equivalent network in Singapore called PayNow, developed by the Association of Banks. This partnership will allow residents of both countries to instantly transfer money to each other via UPI and PayNow.

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