UIDAI CEO: Pandemic strengthened outlook for digital economy's public infrastructure

On Friday, Saurabh Garg, the CEO of UIDAI, the organization responsible for issuing Aadhaar, stated that the pandemic heightened people’s recognition of the digital economy’s importance.

The numbers and scale of digital public infrastructure today, are “staggering”, Garg said speaking at IPCIDE annual conference “State of India’s Digital Economy”.

For Aadhaar, between 2019 to 2022, the number of authentications doubled, he said.

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“When you consider any of the digital public infrastructure Aadhaar obviously being the foundational ID and therefore being basic to many of the others…We’ve seen between 2019 to 2022, a 100 per cent increase in the number of authentications that has been done, weve doubled it. And we reached a stage that were doing around 70 to 80 million transactions per day,” Garg said.

The growth underscores the point that growth of digital economy is “so much more faster”.

And with focus now on larger growth for the entire economy, the digital piece will become even more relevant.

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“I think the last three years of the pandemic, have only strengthened the awareness among everyone of what the digital economy can help and how it can be so much more useful going ahead,” said the top executive of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

(With agency inputs)