Washington | Development and leveraging of digital public infrastructure, which is inclusive by design, can help countries fast pace their development processes and deliver huge benefits, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said.

The minister also a told a conference here that DPI or digital public infrastructure has transferred tremendous transformational potential by facilitating innovations continuously by involving the government as well as private sector. "Development and leveraging of DPI indeed sets a virtuous cycle in motion, which incessantly deliver huge benefits for countries to fast pace development processes," she said on Friday while addressing the "Digital Public Infrastructure: Stacking Up the Benefits" organised by the International Monetary Fund.

The benefits of DPI will go a long way in strengthening the endeavour to achieving strong, inclusive, resilient and sustainable economic growth, she said.

Sitharaman said instances show that the potential of DPI to contribute to both public and private sectors is enormous and can transform the development trajectory of countries even under difficult times.

"In India, during the last couple of years, we have seen how DPI can contribute to targeted, quick and efficient and inclusive service delivery through innovative methods developed by both public and private sector initiatives," she said.

The foundational building blocks approach of India and digital identity that is digital payments and concept-based data sharing have helped "us to improve our governance, bring ease of doing business and enable ease of living for our people", she said.

Leveraging the potential of identity and payments through DPI, India has opened a record 462.5 million low-cost bank accounts with 56 per cent account holders being women, the finance minister said.

"This has enabled us to transform the government service delivery by building the world's largest direct benefit transfer system or DPI-based direct benefit transfer system that has aided about 615 million people who received USD 322 billion directly into their accounts, leading to an overall savings of more than USD27 billion just across key central government services and schemes," she said.

DPI has some inherent features such as interoperability, openness, low-cost access and transparency, and these make it inclusive by design, Sitharaman said. "This has and is helping India in addressing the various digital divide challenges. The scalability feature of our DPI makes investments economical and is therefore, beneficial to the end user as the cost can be minimised, or the access made all together free. This is pro-inclusion," she said.

DPI's interoperability, as in the case of India, allows for multiple solutions to be developed for promoting inclusion, the minister said.

Managing Director, International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva said digital public infrastructure, with its building blocks that are public and private, can tremendously accelerate development as it makes the unaccessible accessible. It also allows the excluded to be included and does it in a very simple and intuitive manner, she said at the conference.

"We learn that we have a role to play on standards and interoperability because we can accelerate access for countries to what others have done. Just over the last two years, we have engaged with countries to learn from India, but also to innovate on their own," she said.

"Our main job in this institution is to provide opportunities for employment and growth for people to reach their potential... and this is the most effective accelerator of inclusion there is," Georgieva said.

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani said digital public infrastructure is a philosophy and a belief that technology can actually transform society, improve lives, enable financial inclusion and create economic growth in a more equitable manner.

"One of the reasons for India's success is political will. I think in India, Prime Minister Modi, Finance Minister Sitharaman are what I would call as Digital First Ministers. In other words, when they look at a public policy issue, they say, can we do this digitally? And that's how companies think how to be digital first," he said. "Now, we have governments ticking like that. So that's a big part of the success of the Indian model," Nilekani said.

The DPI moment has arrived and "I can sense it in every meeting and every conversation", he said and added that "I think we all have a collective goal of having 50 countries implement DPI in five years and I'm sure we'll get that".