“Indian economy will stay on course and is projected to grow at 7% in FY2022-23,” she said during the plenary meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington DC on Friday.
The plenary discussed the priorities identified in IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva’s global policy agenda that seeks to address the complex challenges faced by the global economy, including the combination of weak growth and sticky inflation.
Sitharaman is in the US to attend the annual spring meetings of the World Bank Group (WBG) and the IMF.
The IMF and the World Bank expect India to remain the world’s fastest-growing major economy, the finance ministry said in a series of tweets.
The IMF expects India’s economy to grow 5.9% in FY24 while the World Bank pegs it a tad higher at 6.3%.
Referring to the global sovereign debt roundtable held a few days earlier, Sitharaman said it demonstrated a constructive way forward with multi-stakeholder cooperation for other vulnerable countries.”India is pleased to be part of the team that provided solutions for Sri Lanka and Surinam,” she added.
In her intervention at the plenary, Sitharaman urged G20 members to continue to support multilateral efforts and engage in positive dialogue to fight the challenge of global fragmentation.
The finance minister reiterated India’s commitment to exploring, during its G20 presidency, solutions to pressing global challenges, which disproportionately harm the poorest and most vulnerable.
Digital Public Infrastructure
At a separate IMF event, Sitharaman underscored the critical role that digitisation, especially digital public infrastructure (DPI), can play as a catalyst for global growth.
Listing Benefits
“India is a shining light in this area,” Georgieva said in her opening remarks at the session on Digital Public Infrastructure – Stacking Up the Benefits.
DPI has already created a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem in India, helped improve governance, brought about ease of doing business, and enabled ease of living, Sitharaman said, providing data on India’s progress in the area.
In recent years, India’s direct benefit transfer (DBT) system, backed by DPI, has helped about 650 million people receive $322 billion in their accounts, she said in her address.
Sitharaman added that this has plugged leakages and led to overall savings of more than $27 billion across key central government services and schemes alone.
Leveraging DPI, India has opened 462.5 million low-cost bank accounts, with 56% of holders being women.
More than 68% of total payments in India are being made through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) digital platform, she said.
The Aadhaar-based e-KYC (know your customer) framework has reduced verification costs from ₹500-700 per customer to just ₹3. The consent-based data exchange framework has cut the cost of loan processing by about 75%, she said.
The government also swiftly transferred about $4.5 billion to female Jan Dhan beneficiaries during the pandemic, she said, highlighting DPI’s last-mile reach.