The Prime Minister last week tweeted that digital payments have brought ease and comfort in the lives of many. "It is a common sight across India…our people have shown remarkable dexterity in adapting to tech and innovation," he added. No doubt, the pandemic has given a phenomenal fillip to our digital lives, and this push towards ‘ease of doing’ is evident in every walk of our life, including business.

While this trend is encouraging, experts point out that the progress of digitisation needs to be equal. A recent report states that women constitute only one-third of internet users in the country. Similarly, 67 of the urban population uses the Internet compared to 31 percent of their rural counterparts. Also, in rural India, use of formal financial services is lowest among ST households, followed by SC households and OBC households.

No doubt, in order to address these different kinds of digital divide, the government has taken several measures over the years, but there is still a scope of doing lot more, including strengthening of indigenous ICT infrastructure, promotion of digital literacy particularly at school and college levels, web content creation in the Indian regional languages, creation of a comprehensive cyber-security framework for data security, and so on.

Meanwhile, the Indian industry is playing a significant role in this regard, particularly in the post Covid era, as implied by several recent data sets, one among which points out that in December 2022 India’s digital payment transaction amounted to $1.5 trillion (annualised basis), which is more than the combined digital payments of the US, the UK, Germany and France. So, Indian consumers, in this digital revolution, are playing their own part as well.