NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Unlike the West, Japan and China, which slowly graduated from landline to cordless to cellular telephony and from cash to plastic to mobile payments mode, India has virtually skipped the intermediate stages — cordless telephones and plastic money — of this technological revolution and jumped into cellular telephony and digital banking transaction.

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi announcing on November 8 India’s first major ‘currency vasectomy’, and amid the resultant cash squeeze coming as a disruptive step to fast-forward the country into a breakaway economy, as many as the 23.3 crore unbanked people, out of the 38 crore smartphone users, are skipping the plastic money stage altogether and embarking directly into digital transactional stage, Abhijeet Vijayvergiya, Vice-President and Country Head-India, Capillary Technologies, an omni-channel customer engagement and commerce platform, told BusinessLine.

No wonder, Nandan Nilekani, one of India’s most famous IT czars and creator of Aadhaar cards, while supporting demonetisation of ₹1,000 and ₹500 currency notes, said digital transactions will escalate in the next three to six months to a rate that would otherwise have taken three to six years.