Bill Gates, who is one of the worlds foremost philanthropists has hailed India’s policies for innovation in financial inclusion.
Gates who was speaking at the Singapore Fintech Festival on Tuesday (December 8) said his foundation is working with other nations to roll out technologies based on the ones implemented by India, Bloomberg has reported.
He went on shower praise on India’s platforms like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the Aadhaar, which he said have drastically reduced the cost of money distributed among the poor.
Gates talked about Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric database with almost 123 crore Aadhaar cards having been issued so far and the pivotal role the system has played in preventing leakages via its integration with the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme.
“India is a great example…Things are really exploding there and innovation around that system is phenomenal”, Gates said.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now helping other nations have the same open-source technologies platform.
Gates said at the Singapore Fintech Festival, “If people are going to study one country right now, other than China, I’d say they should look at India. Things are really exploding there and innovation around that system is phenomenal.”
In India, UPI has gone from strength to strength since its introduction in 2016and in November it recorded a whopping 2.2 billion transactions.
Gates also spoke about the COVID-19 pandemic and said ““We can’t forget that another pandemic will come, so we need to invest and be ready,” he said. “Digital things overall — remote learning, telemedicine, digital finance — were greatly advanced. So even though the pandemic has been terrible, it has pushed some of these innovations including how quickly we make vaccines.”