Microsoft entrepreneur Bill Gates has praised India for its “innovation” and “inclusion” in financial transactions,
a step, he said, which has led to frictionless transfer of funds across banks, helping the poor, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Speaking at the Singapore Fintech Festival on Tuesday, Gates
said his philanthropic foundation was in the process of rolling out similar
strategies in other countries to help them equip with digital finance networks
based on open-source technologies.
“If people are going to study one country right now, other
than China, I’d say they should look at India,” Gates said. “Things are really
exploding there and innovation around that system is phenomenal.”
India witnessed a major uptick in UPI (United Payment
Interface)-based financial transactions after the Narendra Modi-led government’s
demonetization of high denomination currency notes in 2016, which it had then
explained as a move to suck out black money from the system.
Over subsequent months, which witnessed huge protestations from
opposition parties and independent agencies over the defeated rationale—99.3% of
the demonetized currency bill came back in circulation — the government
changed its stance saying that the move was designed to make Indians shift from
cash-heavy to digital payment-heavy economy.
“India is a great example,” the co-chairman of the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation said during the virtual conference. His
organization is now helping some countries that don’t have established
standards to roll out similar systems based on open-source technologies, he
added, Bloomberg reported.
Gates said though the pandemic has been “terrible”, it has pushed
people to innovate, and there was advancement in use of digital technologies across
spectrum during the pandemic-hit period.
“Digital things overall — remote learning, telemedicine,
digital finance — were greatly advanced,” he said. “So even though the
pandemic has been terrible, it has pushed some of these innovations, including
how quickly we make vaccines.”
