 Good morning everybody, thank you for having me and primarily here on the invitation of my good friend Dr. Anurag Bhattra. I think it's faster to get from Delhi to Bombay than to get from a meeting in Sahar side to the Santa Cruz side, so that's a good lesson for the morning. Nevertheless, I think two people have spoken already, in the sense Dr. Anurag Bhattra has spoken about his thoughts but he has used the OG of digital in India, Nandan's presentation, so very little stuff for me to say, most of it could be repetitive, so I'm going to skip a lot of those, but here is the underlying couple of themes. Number one, Indians are going digital like never before, whether it's a geo effect or in general of economy waiting to happen. When our government took over in 2014, the new government, we had almost about 15 crore internet connections, today we are close to 90 crores. And I have some data on what is the cost of data, both globally and in India and how it has come down, but how it has spurred consumption in India, data consumption is through the roof. And especially if you travel to comparative countries in Africa, in Latin America, in Central Europe, then you understand what we get, we don't realize it today. We don't even think that we, this one GB a day data consumption costs us anything, it's probably, it's very, very less, it doesn't 10 cents a day. And 10 cents a day is about 8 rupees a day, 250 rupees is a pretty good data plan in India. You go outside, you're watching your data consumption like crazy because the data is still very expensive. We were 155th on data consumption and cost, 155th. Today we are the lowest cost of data in the world, lowest cost and the highest data consumption per capita in the world. Happened in less than nine years. It's, it's not a, it's not a miracle. There is a geo effect, but the geo effect also has the what is called the digital public infrastructure at the back of it. And that's the most, the biggest thing that what Dr. Batra and Nandan have always talked about. India has revitalized the world from the two thinkings. And if you want to read, there's a HBR article I wrote in 2017 on this. There have been two global thinkings. How do you build digital economies or digital platforms? The number one thinking is what we called today, probably we didn't have the insight in 2016 and 17 to call the data for profit, the data for capitalism approach where I used to live and work the Silicon Valley of the world. Great innovation in a way to the top billion. The rest of the people are left out of that digital economy. The second approach had been an approach which India has banned. June 20, 2020, we banned all these platforms coming from a neighbor of ours from the northeast. And we don't operate, none of those. And we don't miss them, by the way. People ask me often, do we miss them? We have so many of these startups in India, some of them represented here who have replaced them all of them. And that is platforms for capitalism or data for surveillance. And that is the two very dichotomical different approaches. Data for profit, which is the US approach. The Shanyan approach was always data for surveillance and use it in different manners. India came out and said we are going to use data for development. And that's been the big change in global thinking today. Suddenly, with COVID, with all the conflicts going on, everybody has understood that technology can be weaponized. A small data point that we are producing, and we don't produce small data points, we produce huge data points, can be completely weaponized if you don't have control on it. In fact, as we speak today, India has passed the Personal Data Protection Act in the Lok Sabha. It's slated to be presented to the Rajsupur today. Should be a hard work for the last six years that it is going to get passed today. And that's a big thing. We today, from tomorrow onwards, whenever the president notifies the Gazette, India will be one of the few countries to have a data protection act, along with a techno legal framework already ready for it. Now that impacts all your digital marketers. There is no omnibus data permissions that can be taken. Purpose will get defined. You cannot use an app X to switch on a torch, pick up all my contacts and send a marketing email to them. Or the loan sharking apps, which use my contact book to name and shame me if I have not paid my loan back on time. The social engineering that they were able to do will become illegal basically. So there is a lot of policy work being done. And I think I can share, being a policymaker, being in the government for many years, that India has perhaps one of the fastest policymaking. As a large democracy in the world, that itself is tedious. But we've done very well, especially when it comes to digital policymaking. And two, of course, along with that, the vision of the Prime Minister of India to lead digital India. And three, the technical capabilities what Dr. Batra was talking about, in early, in mid 2014s, 15s, when we looked inwards towards India, we were a 2% growth domestic consumption. All of us were exporter oriented. We were only thinking export, export, export. There were five or six unicorns in India, if at best. And we were always thinking greener pastures. That has completely changed today. 120 unicorns, 87,000 registered startups, 22% domestic consumption. And that is completely different. You know, Dr. Batra talked about I was at my gov and we said, let's do digital marketing. It was not something that was even registered in DAVP, which is the government's arm to do digital marketing. We have changed that completely now. So that's why one of the big spurts from the government also you're seeing is digital marketing. We have to use all methods and means available to us to reach out to our citizens to reach out and communicate whatever we can. So with that, let me quickly go over certain presentations. India will be the youngest country till 2070, by the way. So a round of applause to all the young people over here. You are going to ensure that we succeed. You're going to really ensure we succeed. In 65% of India's population today is less than 35. Our middle class, so you know, India is another, the world looks at income pyramids in a very, very different way. They look at the rich, the middle class and the poor. India is perhaps the only country, and this is breaking up of India's 240 million households, 24 crore households. We look at the middle class in two different sectors. We have the rich, we have the middle class, we have the aspirational class, and of course the deprived so far. What we look at the aspirational class of people who have got them out of the poverty line and pushed them to become aspirers for a higher middle class. So in a way the lower middle class, higher middle class, upper middle class has been bifurcated into aspirational class. This is really, you can see, this is really a very big category of a new aspirational class which wants to do things in a different manner. This income pyramid is the reason why India chose to do the things that we have talked about that everybody has started off, the digital public infrastructure, the data for development. Because the global platforms start from the top. Who did, who did, when for example a company like Facebook got launched, they, you needed a smartphone, you needed a laptop, you needed an internet connection. They were targeting the top, the blue, right? The top millions, family owners to have all these devices and tools. When we started building our digital architecture, we needed to think of the bottom of the pyramid. That is fundamentally different from anywhere, any country, any society in the world that has built digital platforms. We thought bottom up, we thought of how we can include the poorest of the poor into our digital economy and that has been the core of digital India. You saw Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad who stayed as the longest minister for digital in India as a minister of information technology and electronics. And he said something which is very key, the aim of digital India was to empower the poorest of the poor. And that's what we have achieved by the way. And some of the numbers I'll present and this is the digital DNA of India. But these are the three mega trends going on. Number one, Indians are going digital like never before. Two, India is making digital infrastructure as public goods. Now, what does it mean? I mean, I'm a professor also, so I can always ask questions, but really what does it mean? It really means that whatever technology we are building is non-rent seeking. O and D C we are making is not really free free, but it's non-rent seeking. There's a big difference between saying something is free, vis-a-vis something is non-rent seeking. Non-rent seeking means sustainable. Non-rent seeking means there's equitability in that building that platform. And we are making digital infrastructure as public goods. No country in the world has done that, which means that it is equally available to startups, to corporates, to businesses, to fintechs, to banks, and to the government. That's what happened with Geo. What did Geo change that changed the telecom industry? Not only in India but worldwide. They started digital onboarding using the government's EKYC platform. That's it. Brought down the customer acquisition cost from $20 to $1. And that is what has changed. So Adhaar brought about this revolution in our lives where a billion people participate, but really it's the EKYC of DigiLocker that enabled companies like Geo to offer complete digital onboarding experience. This is some of the data I was talking about on the data connectivity. You know, from 269 rupees per GB, we are down to 14 rupees in GB on an average, and our data consumption has gone up to 17 GB a month. Also, do you also know India is primarily an Android country? 98% of us use Android in India. 95% of Android phones now are technically made in India. Do you know this? 95%. From having two manufacturing plants in India, we have 272 assembling and manufacturing plants in India in the last nine years. You have to be proud when you see an iPhone SE being made in India. iPhone 14 being made in India. $12 billion worth of iPhone exports from India. It was unimaginable a few years ago. And now we do it. Everybody talks about UPI. But what everybody does not talk about UPI is that of the 9.3 billion payments we do every month, we move about 40% of India's GDP. But the biggest thing is we were joked and ridiculed in 2016 and 2017 during demonetization, me including. I was part of the Digital Payments Committee that you think India will pay 10 rupees on a QR code, on a mobile phone. I think we can give that back to them today. Today everybody uses, in fact, I always joke with my NRI friends how do you identify NRI during the December-January season in India? They're paying by cash. All of us don't. And that is what has happened in India. And the interesting fact is that of the 9.3 billion payments, more than 300 million people actually make a payment in India every month using UPI. Now 300 million cannot be the 5 million rich only. 300 million cannot be just the middle class. There has to be a combination of all of them. And that is the inclusivity, the ubiquity that digital payments has done in India. Everybody is using them. I studied in a small but the oldest towns in the world, Kashi, Banaras. I went to an IIT there. And I still teach there. You go there. Everybody wants to accept digital payments. Now if you understand why they want to accept digital payments there's a lesson in understanding real consumer, real Bharat. That some of you in Delhi and Bombay don't understand. And I've done a full research on that, a PhD level research on why people in India are accepting digital payments. Not because it's free. That's one of the reasons. But because it gives them efficiency. And the second point I think they can call some Harvard economists and teach them that. The third point on efficiency is very big. Say sir I have to now, 12 rupees if I have to sell something I have to give 8 rupees change. That takes my time. Or I have to give them the useless candies. Useless for him, not for the company that makes it. That's gone now. He says they come, they scan the code, they go away. The speaker speaks, 12 rupees received. I don't waste my time serving one consumer. I can serve more consumers. But the last point leaves the enormous baffled. He says I can do pricing at the way I want to price it. I can price at 12.5 rupees now. If my real cost is 12.5 to serve, yesterday I was rounding off to 15 or 20. That was inflationary for the consumer. Today actual price is 12.5. I don't worry about giving the right price. That is what UPI has changed. And to get the deep insight you need to travel to India, to the real Bharat. In DC, Dr. Bhattra talked about it. I'll come to that. That's the next revolution. Suddenly inspired by all this adoption of digital payments in India. And I'll talk about one more thing that we... I mean, Coven, he talked about. How many of you know that you can get and schedule a Coven appointment under one of the most popular apps in the world? Has anybody tried this? The number 9013151515. This is a Coven bot, a MyGov bot. You save it in a WhatsApp, send a message, schedule your appointment. Get your vaccine certificate. I never carry my vaccine certificate. That print out or whatever. Americans carry a card. The Silicon Valley carries a paper card. We carry a WhatsApp number. You send a WhatsApp saying certificate. It will send you an OTP. You'll get your certificate there and then only. Has anybody tried that? Please do. Some of you have. Now, most of the... Because the pandemic technically is over, so nobody asked for a vaccine certificate. There was a time that you had to go to a mall. You had to show a vaccine certificate. Right? We have it online. But what did this thing do? The messaging is very important. 1.1 billion Indians in less than two years got vaccinated. 2.3 billion doses got done. Can any platform in the world boast of those numbers? Any platform, I challenge it. But delivered with a lot of complexity at the background, simplicity in the front end. The front end is what? Could be your COVID website or could be even a WhatsApp. Because 600, 700 million people in India have used WhatsApp. Makes it simple. The digital public infrastructure makes technology simple for the consumer. Remember, bottom up. Vis-a-vis and removes the complexity and moves it in the background. And that is the game changer that we have done. That's how you get adoption at the bottom of the pyramid. And that is what we are building with ONDC. A population scale intervention like the UPI to democratize e-commerce in India. So interoperable. You can buy things on e-commerce on using any app. Why can't you do that? You can use an existing app, a phone pay, a payTM, a banking app to buy and, you know, to hail a taxi to order your goods to order your, you know, food and grocery. Yeah, why not? And non-brand seeking. So what does the non-brand seeking do? It gives more power to the retailer, to the trader. Instead of sharing a 30 percent, 20-30 percent commission, they probably can live with 5 percent, which is affordable to them. That is why credit card and debit card acceptance was low. The MDR reduction, making it zero because of UPI, have brought in the digital payments. The reduction in commission is going to change the way we do e-commerce in India. And the previous slide did talk about what we are going to see as a growth. You know, we are going to see a 3x, 4x growth in the next couple of years. So that is what ONDC is going to do. This is a small revolution that happened in India that nobody actually really paid attention to. Fast tax. A great experiment in digital and change management. We enforced fast tax on all lanes in India, all toll bridges in India. Today 98 percent of Indians, 98 percent use fast tax. Why? Number one, the real cost of the toll is let's say 100 rupees. On fast tax, it's 50 rupees. Two, you don't have to wait. India figured out, Bharat figured out that they are wasting time and burning more petrol, waiting in a queue if they don't have fast tax. They adopted it. People don't get this very fast anywhere in the world. Get fast tax. There's a guy standing, there used to be a person standing right about 100 meters before the toll and saying, I will link it to your UPI in two minutes. That's how it got adopted. Small entrepreneurs, national level infrastructure, everybody adopted it. Today we collect more than 40,000 crores of fast tax revenue. 6 billion, 48,000, 50,000 crores. All on digital. Government is benefiting even though we're giving a discount because now there is no chori at the toll bridges. Most of these toll bridges, toll roads are run on a revenue share basis. We get the real revenue. But what does it tell? 98 percent means almost every car in India, every vehicle in India is falling a fast tax. And very short span of two years. Revolutions can happen very fast in this country. You just have to give them the right technology, right reasons very, very fast. Startup India is a great example because there was a talk of funding winter. I don't call it a funding winter. A winter is a winter and you're not prepared for it if you go out in the cold and you're not wearing the proper clothing. We have the proper clothing. We have the right policies, right infrastructure. We've had our governance cowboys who have gone out there and done nonsense. And that will continue all everywhere in the world. But the government runs a fund-of-fund scheme which I'm very proud to be part of. It's a sizable fund for Indian venture capital funds. Monday we had a meeting. We give 126 allotis in India a venture fund which then goes and invests in other funds and allotment. So we are ensuring that whether there is a funding winter or not, we are properly equipped. 86, 87,000 startups in India, PLI scheme for manufacturing. And you should ask the manufacturing ecosystem how much support they're getting. Again, a very small trend but a very interesting trend, not a small trend though. Again, all of us who have invested in equity markets in India know that it was always meant for the 20 million richest individuals in India. Today, because of the low cost of customer acquisition, something that I'm trying to explain in the slide, we have the likes of almost 2 million DMAT accounts being added every month. 20 million total were there. Now we have 2 million every month. We have almost 105 million, 10 crore plus people having a DMAT account in India in the last 2 to 3 years. That's why you've seen companies like Zero that are really doing very, very well. Last few things and then I will leave it for some thoughts and comments. India's digital story, something we have to think about, something we have to learn to adopt and think, is happening because we have open innovation which is built on the back of this public infrastructure, digital public infrastructure. It's built on two other very important concepts, scale. Nothing is done from a national level if it does not have scale. We saw an ad of a company and much congratulations to them. They're talking about 40 million downloads. That's 4 crore, that's less than 3% population in India. But a startup can be proud of a 40 kilo download. The government is not proud unless it reaches 100 to 200 million people. That's a minimum benchmark. At my gov, I had 225 million citizens that I talked and impacted every month. If it is not a number less than 100 million, I don't think so. I will have the audience with the digital leadership of India. So vision is scale. Second vision is speed. All these things, I've talked about speed of fast tag. I've talked about speed of ONDC. People thought it will never succeed. Here we are. Last year on 29 April 2022, we launched ONDC in a beta phase. We were doing zero transactions. That was a launch date. On 29 April 2023, we are doing, or right now, we are doing almost 100,000 transactions a day. Not like 5,000, 100,000 a day. That's a 3 million run rate a month. By the way, if you compare it apples to apple with UPI, we are far ahead. So you know where the adoption will happen. When I used to present UPI in 2017, I had to tell people, we do 5 million transactions a month. Today we are talking in billions. Millions have gone to billions. I'm very sure that's what is going to happen with ONDC also. So agile policy making, I talked about that. And digital infrastructure at par with the physical and social infrastructure. So that is what is happening. And because somebody talked about generative AI and what you should also study and the app local, if the people are here, do come and meet me. We are very, very passionate at a national level to make priority in national languages of India. In the mother tongues of India and the local languages of India. We are building what is called a project Bhashini that NLP in our own language. Why should we have western models for large data models, large language models? We need our own data models. And project Bhashini is all about that. Making sure India's languages, India's culture, India's diversity is represented. When the AI engines pick up data and make the, you know, give out answers. So you should be studying about the Bhashini project if you are, if you are passionate about Bharat in India. With that, thank you very much. As I said, I had 20 minutes of time. I have kept within time Dr. Bhattra. But more importantly, I have communicated what I wanted to communicate thanks to the precursors from Dr. Anurag Bhattra and of course Nandan. And I'm happy to answer any questions if you have. I'm outside around. But believe me, this is the time that we have always thought about India leading the world. And I would leave this room with a simple quote that while the Silicon Valley, in India, my Senjian Valley doesn't operate. The Chinese valleys don't operate. You know that, right? But while the Silicon Silicon Valley companies will innovate for the top billion, you and me and India will innovate for the next 7 billion of the world. Thank you very much.