Report on ‘Connected Commerce: Creating a Roadmap for a Digitally Inclusive Bharat’

Context

NITI Aayog and Mastercard released a report titled ‘Connected Commerce: Creating a Roadmap for a Digitally Inclusive Bharat’.

About the report

• The report identifies the challenges in accelerating digital financial inclusion in India and also provides recommendations for making digital services accessible to its 1.3 billion citizens.
• NITI Aayog was a knowledge partner in this endeavour.
• The report highlights key issues and opportunities, with inferences and recommendations on
  • policy and capacity building across agriculture
  • small business (MSMEs)
  • urban mobility
  • cyber security

Key issues addressed during the knowledge series were

• Digital financial inclusion: Acceleration of digital financial inclusion for underserved sections of Indian society.
• Support to SMEs: Enabling SMEs to ‘get paid, get capital and get digital’ and access customers, and ensure their continued resilience.
• Cyber resilience: Policy and technological interventions to foster trust and increase cyber resilience.
• Agriculture Support: Unlocking the promise of digitization in India’s agriculture sector.
• Digital roadmap: The essential elements of a digital roadmap to make transit accessible for all citizens.

Key recommendations in the report include:

• Strengthening the payment infrastructure: To promote a level playing field for NBFCs and banks.
• MSMEs support: Digitizing registration and compliance processes and diversifying credit sources to enable growth opportunities for MSMEs.
• Building information sharing systems: which include a ‘fraud repository’, and ensuring that online digital commerce platforms carry warnings to alert consumers to the risk of frauds.
• Enabling agricultural NBFCs: To access low-cost capital and deploy a ‘phygital’ (physical + digital) model for achieving better long-term digital outcomes. Digitizing land records will also provide a major boost to the sector.
• Ease of mobility: To make city transit seamlessly accessible to all with minimal crowding and queues, leveraging existing smartphones and contactless cards, and aim for an inclusive, interoperable, and fully open system such as that of the London ‘Tube’.