With India's digital public infrastructure (DPI), the country is going from an offline, informal, low productivity, multiple set of micro economies to a single online, formal, high productivity mega economy, said Infosys Co-founder and Chairman Nandan Nilekani on Sunday.

Nilekani also said that India's digital public infrastructure such as Aadhaar, the unified payments interface, digilocker and others are not just "good to have" but a "must-have".

Speaking at the B20 Summit in Delhi, Nilekani said, "What is fundamentally happening is India is going from an offline, informal, low-productivity, multiple set of micro economies to a single online, formal, high-productivity mega economy. This is the trend of the next 20 years. This has been solved by a new way of solving problems called digital public infrastructure, which solves problems with technology at population scale."

"Whenever you use a digital platform, it creates data. India has invented a unique idea of how individuals and companies can use their own data footprint to monetise it. This data footprint is their digital capital. And individuals can use digital capital to get ahead in life. This concept doesn't exit anywhere in the world," Nilekani, who has spearheaded India's DPI revolution, said.

He added that over the last several years, India has transformed in many ways and this digital transformation is at the heart of economic growth.

The veteran technology executive also said that DPI can help adaptation as well as mitigation of the climate crisis.

"There is going to be a huge need for individual cash transfers for climate action. You will need digital infrastructure to identify and transfer funds to people to help them with climate mitigation and building a circular economy," he noted.

DPI will help people to be agile and flexible when it comes to climate adaptation, he said.

Noting that India's DPIs are an innovative model for inclusive growth, Nilekani said, “We think this model is unique, it's collaborative, it's equitable, and it's based on the principle that opportunity must be made available to everyone in the country, irrespective of where they are. This is something which is now gaining global recognition, and now whether it's Bill Gates or whether it's the IMF, they're all recognizing India's unique contribution to digital public infrastructure. And therefore there is now a major move afoot to take this model to 50 countries in five years.”

Citing numerous data points related to DPIs, the Infy co-founder said: "India was able to transfer $4.5 billion to the bank accounts of 150 million citizens during Covid owing to DPIs, while 700 million people already have their bank accounts connected to their Aadhaar numbers."

He further said that UPI is seeing huge adoption because it's safe and convenient. "India did in 9 years what would have taken 47 years by traditional means. We went from being one of the most unbanked countries to most financially inclusive countries."

All of this, as per Nilekani, wouldn't have been possible without the $250 billion IT services industry. "To complement it, we have an extraordinary startup ecosystem. In 2016, we had 1,000 startups. Now we have 1 lakh. It is not a linear growth of 10 percent but a 10x growth," he said.