Page 47 - Banking Finance December 2023

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smartphones and how much data they are consuming. In a
granular manner, Google can also offer data points on what
people are watching, searching and where they are spending
and shopping. Adding to that, Swiggy and Zomato are
delivering the food data.

Such new indicators are also covering a lot of people who
were not part of the system. India is adding digital tools one
after the other and the business models are getting rebuilt.

Unorganised segments

To bring everyone into the system, the labour ministry has
launched e-Shram, a portal which is a central database for
unorganised workers. It tracks the major five sectors. Out
of them, agri has the highest number at 1.96 crore
registrations. Construction has 1.18 crore and apparel 94
struggled hard going from counter to counter and thousand registrations, which are seeded all through
negotiating huge paperwork to get some subsidy. Under the Aadhaar.
direct benefit transfer, 47 crore beneficiaries are registered
under various 180 schemes, and during the pandemic What is needed?
government transferred Rs 1.41 lakh crore to them. From
vaccination to admission, a robust system is being built with While the digital system is robust and with interoperability,
users and beneficiaries are getting tracked is quite
the support of digital infrastructure.
remarkable. But tracking their data and helping them get
New Economic Indicators benefits are two different things. The majority of the
financial institutions are still focusing heavily on urban and
Along with the established high-frequency economic the same set of borrowers. But the people at large in small
indicators, new metrics have emerged to understand the villages are still struggling to get loans to buy a bike or open
state of the economy. From how many people are getting a shop. Having more data will certainly help lenders in taking
tap water facilities to how many of them are using LPG decisions but what about the large population which is new
cylinders, there are new ways to gauge the economy. to credit? India's credit-to-GDP ratio is still very low. And
Similarly, the electricity meter reading and the railway
passenger traffic data show the consumption story. Apart
from the EPFO, various private websites are showcasing the
real picture of the job market. Along with the sale of
vegetables, the data on organic food is also being taken into
consideration.

Apart from this, economists are also looking at UPI, Bharat
Bill Payment System, National Electronic Toll collection and
online verification data to get the pulse of the digital
economy. How many new bank accounts are opened and
how many people are buying insurance or renewing it?
Banks are also sharing the growth of numbers from their
digital initiatives such as payment and digital lending
including BNPL. Telcos can share how many people are using

42 | 2023 | DECEMBER | BANKING FINANCE