NEW DELHI: West Asia’s instability and the economic shock from higher energy prices have to be offset through gains in productivity and competitiveness elsewhere in the economy, said Chief Economic Adviser V Anantha Nageswaran on Monday.
Nageswaran said the fiscal and inflationary consequences of energy disruptions fall hardest on small farmers, micro-entrepreneurs, and daily wage workers. India, he noted, remains heavily dependent on imported fossil fuels, while energy demand has already climbed to roughly three times the global average.
Speaking at the launch of NITI Aayog’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) 2047 roadmap report, he argued that India must treat digital public infrastructure not just as a tool to serve India’s long-run development aspiration, but also to “build a distributed economic resilience that any open economy needs when the external environment turns hostile.”
The Centre’s official policy think tank on Monday laid out what it calls DPI 2.0: a 10-year effort to extend the country’s digital public infrastructure beyond financial inclusion into agriculture, jobs, health, education, credit, and energy.
The productivity-focused DPI 2.0 framework aims to catalyse non-linear economic growth on the road to a $30 trillion economy by 2047, which, if delivered, could lead to a contribution of 4 per cent of GDP from digital infrastructure by 2030, up from roughly 1 per cent today. “India must unlock nonlinear, productivity-driven growth while ensuring that the gains of progress are shared inclusively across all regions and communities,” the report noted.
The report further noted that India does not yet have a large enough base of technology entrepreneurs to build the solutions the roadmap requires. Fixing that gap, through incubators, mission-focused research clusters, and procurement rules that favour local startups, is treated as equally urgent as building the infrastructure itself.
Moving away from top-down directives, the report argued for district-level development goals to aggregate demand. “The district programmes are envisaged as a mechanism to aggregate demand for DPI-based solutions, which acts as the single largest incentive for tech entrepreneurs, providing a secure pipeline of work,” the report added.
The immediate action window is 2026 and 2027. Six champion states will run lighthouse pilots across three priority areas, such as market expansion for small enterprises, job matching for local workers, and better livelihoods for smallholder farmers. Successful models are then meant to roll out to at least five additional states in year two.
Four structural bets underpin everything — opening up siloed data, democratising AI access in Indian languages, building interoperable transaction networks to replace closed platforms, and digitally onboarding the informal economy’s physical entities such as shops, cooperatives, and panchayats onto these networks.
“If you lower the cost of trust, democratise data, make AI work in Bhojpuri, Oriya, and Marathi, and root market linkages through open interoperable networks rather than closed platforms, you can compress decades of catch-up growth into a single decade of compounding returns,” the CEA reckoned.
Nageswaran highlighted the report’s framing of DPI as a total factor productivity engine, linking it to the broader economic literature on how countries escape the middle-income trap. That, he suggested, is the right intellectual starting point for India’s next stage of growth.
Also speaking at the launch, NITI Vice-Chairman Suman Bery said that large language models are likely to become commoditised over time, so the real opportunity for India lies in diffusion and application. “It is really a question of the application; that is where India needs to focus,” he said.
He also placed productivity at the centre of the development debate. Bery said the most important development question is how AI and DPI raise productivity, because better jobs and livelihoods depend on productivity gains.
Source: Business Standard
