Chief of Staff of the Prime Minister, other dignitaries sitting on the dais with me, Your Excellency the Ambassador of India here in Armenia, and distinguished guests. I had food poisoning and I'm a little bit weak, so if I don't sound very vigorous, I hope you will kindly understand and excuse me.
India is an area of 3.3 million square kilometers and is the seventh largest country in the world in surface area. India has 600,000 villages and about 8,000 towns spread over this vast area. It stretches from the north edge by 3,000 kilometers to the south edge and by 3,000 kilometers from the eastern edge of the country to the western edge of the country. It also happens to be the third largest economy in the world. It has per capita GDP of 2,300 US dollars in 2023 and about 9,000 on a PPP purchasing power basis.
Then Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh noted in 2009 that the only way every Indian resident can experience the outcomes of the economic progress that India had been making since 1991 economic reform was to embrace the death of distance and death of time paradigm through the power of digitalization for India.
Also, the first step in this mammoth task was to ensure cyber security and the sovereign safety through unique digital identity given to every Indian resident. He invited my colleague Shri Nandan Nilekani, the then ex-CEO and co-chairman of Infosys, to bring his enormous expertise in leading technology project management, requirement definition, design, implementation, and constant upgrade of mission-critical software systems. Dr. Singh gave Shri Nilekani the rank of a senior cabinet minister in his government to communicate to the Indian residents the importance of providing a unique identity for every Indian resident. Shri Nilekani enunciated the vision for Digital India and led the Unique Identification Authority of India with distinction.
Succeeding Prime Minister Shri Modi, visionary, realized the importance of digitalization in improving public governance and quickly embraced Digital India, supported it, and actually expanded it. PM Modi wanted every department of the Government of India to be digitalized to provide paperless, cashless, and faceless services to every resident across the country, especially in rural and remote parts of India.
What is the vision of Digital India? The vision of Digital India is to transform India into a digital empowered society and a knowledge economy. The major components of this vision are: one, make digital infrastructure a core utility for every Indian resident. This aspect of Digital India vision includes making high-speed internet pervasive to provide digital delivery of services to both governmental and private services to every resident. It provides Aadhaar, which is a 12-digit unique identity to every Indian resident to authenticate his or her identity for every digital transaction. It involves bringing the power of mobile and internet banking to provide financial inclusion to every resident. It provides the India Stack, a set of online and offline systems and applications to bring financial inclusion and e-commerce facility to everyone, both small and large, and to every resident using the power of mobile payment systems. It provides a modern, safe, and secure access to various digital resources while protecting the privacy of the government service providers and that of the Aadhaar card holders.
The second aspect of the vision is to bring the power of digital governance to every public service in India. This aspect of Digital India vision includes digitally enabling every function of the government, including tax systems and every e-governance services to enhance productivity and efficiency in the government and eliminating silos for the residents. It is about providing various citizen and resident services by these departments in real time using the power of mobile and other platforms. A good example of this is what is called Jan Dhan Yojana program, which disburses monetary benefits to women, farmers, and people in the informal sector as well as for affordable housing, crop, medical, and life insurance among other uses. The scheme was a transformative pillar to reshape financial inclusion by giving access to the lowest strata of society, the rich and the poor, powerful and the weak, educated and not so educated, to formal banking. Direct benefit transfer of wages and funds in various governmental schemes and health care insurance services like Ayushman Bharat have helped the poor enormously. It has brought women and weaker sections, especially those in the rural areas, into the banking system. It was hugely useful during the COVID pandemic. It has also provided digitally transformed facility in banking, retailing, education, health care, and many other e-governance functions.
According to the Government of India, the third aspect of vision of the Digital India vision is the digital empowerment of citizens. This aspect of Digital India vision is about providing universal digital literacy, universal access to digital resources, and providing user interface to all digitalization applications in every one of the 15 Indian languages, which are as different as Russian and English, or Russian, Armenian, and English. It also aims to provide collaborative digital platforms for participative governance. As part of promoting cashless transactions and converting India into a cashless or less cash society, various modes of digital payments are available, and most of them, including credit, debit, and prepaid cards, USSD, which is a short message service for financial applications, Aadhaar-enabled payment service, unified payment interface, and service, mobile wallets, point of sale terminals, micro ATMs, internet banking, and mobile banking.
What has been the impact of Digital India? Let me give you a few data points for you to appreciate how this initiative has helped India. India progressed from being the most unbanked country in the world as late as 2008 to a country with 96% of 1.4 billion Indians owning a bank account as quickly as 2013. And folks, you people know it's not an easy thing to go from very low digits to 96% of 1.45 billion citizens. This period of just 15 years would have taken at least 50 years, at least 50 years, if not 100 years without digital inclusion. The female ownership of bank accounts increased from a small and paltry 26% in 2011 to 77% in 2021. I don't have the latest percentage, but I think it's more like 90 to 92%. Second, about 1.3 billion Aadhaar cards have been issued. This is the largest effort in the world. No other country in the world has issued 1.3 billion digitalization unique identity cards. Third, the number of smartphone users increased from a small 10% of our population in 2014 to more than 70% of our population in 2023. But remember, there are 650,000 villages and they are as far apart as 3,000 kilometers. Therefore, when you look at the immensity of the country, then you will realize the achievement. My understanding is today it should be at least 80 to 82%. Fourth, the cost of digital data transmission went down from USD 4 per gigabyte in 2014 to just 10 cents US per gigabyte in 2020. Folks, you will understand that it went down by a factor of 40 in a matter of just nine years. It also tells you how well smartphones and digital data have been embraced by the residents. We don't use the word citizen for Aadhaar, we use the word resident for certain reasons. So because we want Aadhaar to be available to every resident, whether Indian or not Indian, it doesn't matter as long as he is resident of India, he or she will have access to Aadhaar.
Fifth, India went from a negligible number of digital transactions as late as 2006 to about 8 billion total transactions in 2022. Sixth, today you can have cashless transactions with an illiterate seller or coconut water vendor on a remote hill in a remote village using this facility, as I have done. Seventh, FASTag issues have increased from almost zero in 2016 to about 24 million in 2023. Eighth, the cumulative direct benefit transfer that is given by the Government of India to the poor people, that amount has exceeded 300 billion dollars in 2023, and the cumulative number of beneficiaries has exceeded 9 billion Indian residents. There are about 380 million registered beneficiaries forming 29% of the population who use this direct benefit transfer funds from the Government of India. Then ninth, this is very interesting, the tax collection has gone up four times between 2010 and 2022. Probably it should be now about eight times. I don't have the data, but definitely between 2010 and 2022, it went up by a factor of four. Tenth, India built vaccine distribution and management platform called CoWIN as a digital public infrastructure to accelerate vaccine delivery. The belief is India is probably the most successful country to deliver vaccine to as many as 2.5 billion vaccine doses to as many as probably about a billion Indians. Eleventh, DIKSHA, which is a digital infrastructure for knowledge sharing, offers over 8,000 courses and content of 200,000 items in 30 languages of the country from 11,000 contributors. As of date, it is increasing rapidly day after day after day. And very interestingly, it has clocked over 60 billion learning minutes in usage. It is also used for skill development. And the last one that I use, India has the third largest online shopping community, just behind the US and China. There were, I would say, 140 million online shoppers about two years ago. Now, of course, it should be much higher.
How did it happen? It happened due to the creation of India Stack. As many of you technical people know, as the primary platform for Digital India, India Stack uses most important open source software for every internal component. It is created as building blocks powered by interoperable, open, and controlled standards. It is not void to any company in the world. Everything is open source. Therefore, everybody in the world can use it. The components of the stack are Aadhaar, e-KYC, e-Signature, GSTN, and you know many others. I don't want to name them because those names may be somewhat unfamiliar with you, I believe.
Finally, folks, to this great country, great country of Armenia, a country that invented ATM, a country that produced one of the greatest tennis players in the world, a country that contributed one of the inventors of supercomputers, just to name a few, even such an advanced country would probably have some important piece that may be useful to them from the Digital India experiment. Once again, let me thank you for your kindness, your generosity, and your affection. I remain very, very grateful to this great country and to every one of you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
