External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday stated that in today’s global landscape, like-minded countries need to work together to de-risk the economy, rise to the challenges of the digital world and build relationships that serve as stabilisers for the economy.

Speaking at the Raisina @ Sydney Business Breakfast, organised jointly by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and India’s Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in Sydney, Jaishankar noted that transformational governance changes under way in India were showing results. A strong digital backbone was paving the way for efficient and effective delivery.

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India, he said, was moving ahead to record the largest number of cashless transactions in the world. “If you look at our cashless transactions, the UPI, I think we record the largest number of cashless transactions in the world. So there’s been a kind of a technology leapfrogging in the psyche of people, and that’s been actually a very big difference,” he added.

Jaishanar said; ”The digital was ensuring the integrity of delivery and transaction that would not have been possible equally on the financial side because we encouraged people to open bank accounts, sometimes bank accounts with no money. But we were, again, during the same period, putting money into the bank accounts of 41,50,00,000 people who are the lowest income in the country. And if you ask me, how did you get through COVID, I cannot overstate the importance of financially supporting people and feeding people and ensuring that this works on the ground,” he said.

Jaishankar also stated that digital governance has now become the basic mechanism to do socioeconomic delivery. “India is trying to demonstrate that the country can construct a social, comprehensive social welfare system, even at the scale of income. And the scale of income is USD 2,000 per capita,” he added.

Talking about the social programmes, Jaishankar said that in the last four years, India has been able to cover about 500 million people in health schemes, about the same number covered by pension schemes.

“There was a programme to replace firewood with cooking gas. And the cooking gas, the initial lot of cooking gas, you get free of cost. Now, that programme was as big as 80 million people. We have a housing program, a housing program. We have already delivered 30 million houses, and at five people, a family in India, which means 150,000,000 people have been covered,” Jaishankar said.

During his visit, Jaishankar met top Australian leaders, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and discussed regional and global issues.