“There has been no 2 per cent dip in GDP and no agrarian crisis, in fact the agriculture sowing went up.” Jaitley said in his address at ICICI Rural Summit-Sashakt Gaon, Samriddh Bharat in Delhi. The event marked ICICI Group dedicating 100 'ICICI Digital Villages' to the nation.
On the occasion Chanda Kocchar Managing Director & CEO, ICICI Bank announced “We plan to scale the 100 villages to a 500 this year. People in the villages are equally excited to adapt to technology, they now understand the inherent advantages of a digital India.”
In his address Jaitley noted that the debate around the idea of economic reforms have a political implications has vanished from India now. He also pointed out that when the government came up with PM ‘s Jan Dhan Yojana and people had their superficial questions, like what is the point of people having bank accounts with no money in it, without realizing what financial inclusion can do to this country. Suddenly we had the world’s largest financial inclusion plan in which the banking industry had played a pivotal role.
“Then came an emphasis of a unique ID, and suddenly came a legislation where the central and the state governments made sure that a large number of payments from subsidies to scholarships to pensions, to payments under rural employment guarantee scheme , could all be sent into accounts which otherwise did not have any balance,” said Jaitley.
Acknowledging the support of the banking sector towards a digitized economy in India , Jaitley encouraged other banks to emulate the ICICI initiative .
Talking about the recently launched Aadhaar Pay, Jaitley said “Aadhaar enabled payment system is unique to only India no other country in the world has this privilege, where your thumb is your partner.”
“This is the first step towards a completely digitized economy and surely a big one. Our aim is to make every village in India have electricity by 2018 and all road connectivity by 2019.If all the banks follow the idea of digitizing Indian villages that will bring about a complete digital revolution in India” Jaitley added further.
Jaitley pointed out that the impact of the economic reforms taking place in the country is impacting people in the rural areas and that is the fundamental change taking place in the country today.
The 100 ICICI digital villages have been spread across 17 states in India.
