When the country is debating digital shift and fintech companies are gaining steam in India, a comment from a bureaucrat shows a greater possibility of India making a digital shift.
Debit cards, credit cards as well as ATMs will be redundant in next three-four years and people will only opt for mobile phones for financial transactions, government think tank Niti Aayog's chief executive officer (CEO) Amitabh Kant has been quoted by PTI as saying.
Kant said the country will have an edge over other economies because it has a huge young population. "With India being a country where 72 percent population is below 32 years of age, it will have an advantage over other regions like the US and Europe in terms of demographic dividend," he said.
Speaking at the the Amity University Noida campus, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree, Kant said: "India will make credit cards, debit cards and ATMs technologically redundant in next three-four years and we all will be using mobiles for doing many transactions."
Boasting on some parameters where India stand big, he said India is the only country in the world with a billion biometrics and as many mobile phones and bank accounts, and therefore it will be the only nation in future to make a lot of disruptions.
"More financial transactions will be done on mobile phones and this trend is already rising spirally," he said.
The Niti Aayog CEO praised the country's growth as against the economic slump in many other economies. "India is growing at around 7.5 percent per annum and it is an oasis of growth in the midst of a very barren economic landscape across the world but our challenge is to grow at even higher rates of 9-10 per cent," he said.
