India to witness massive formalization of economy through tech: Nandan Nilekani

“What you are seeing in India now is a domino effect and all these things coming together … This will lead to massive formalization,” Nilekani said at an event hosted by workforce management startup Betterplace in the city.

“Historically, it made more sense to be outside the system because of the informal economy. Now, being formal will be more valuable and you are going to see the great formalization of India in the next 10 years,” he added.

He said Jio-enabled smartphones, cheaper internet, digitization, the homegrown startup boom that saw the likes of Swiggy, Ola, Flipkart and Oyo rise to prominence, verification of certificates like experience or vaccination, skilling and open networks were the “domino” blocks that would lead to the massive formalization of the economy eventually.

The OCEN protocol enables customer- and MSME-facing apps to effectively ‘plug-in’ lending capabilities into their current products and services.

ONDC democratizes e-commerce by pitching unorganized retailers and corner stores online to create a level-playing field that would help them take on giants like Walmart-owned Flipkart and Amazon.

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NDEAR will act as a ‘super connect’ between various academic activities such as e-learning models and school records.

These backbone networks are all aimed at formalizing the economy.

It will lead to job creation and economic growth as well as increased tax collection, he said.

There has already been a 20-30% increase in Income-Tax collections this year against India’s 7% GDP growth, as artificial intelligence and integration of financial transactions are plugging evasions, he added.

Nilekani urged companies to look at the India Stack programmes to scale up their businesses and create jobs.

He cited the examples of retail brokerage Zerodha and telecom operator Reliance Jio, which had used Aadhaar-based Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, and fintech entities PhonePe and Google Pay, which had made use of the Unified Payments Interface railroad.