India on Wednesday (1 September) advocated for harnessing digital technologies and public digital platforms towards technology embedded governance and social inclusion at the UNCTAD high-level policy dialogue.

At the event, ministers from India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka shared policy experiences towards digital inclusion and social empowerment at the policy dialogue. The webinar was a pre-event organized in the run-up to the fifteenth session of the Ministerial Conference of the UNCTAD.

While talking about the story of India's digitization drive, Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that India’s success story of digitalisation is driven by the public and private sector in the global technology eco-system in terms of providing innovative solutions to the world.

The minister highlighted that India is poised today as one of the largest connected countries in the world in terms of Internet connectivity with around 80 Crore people online and one of the world’s largest rural broadband connectivity projects being executed, the IT Ministry said in a statement on Thursday (2 September).

He also shared that the distance between the citizen and government has been bridged tremendously over the last six years by leveraging technology and public digital platforms including digital identity, digital payments systems and digital literacy and thus preventing the leakage of social subsidies.

The minister also highlighted the importance of technology and said that India has demonstrated the power of technology in governance working for the common citizen and small businesses.

Chandrasekhar also shared that under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has successfully showcased a technology led model of governance by embedding technology into the governance and transforming the lives of people and India is ready to partner with all like-minded nations towards development in the technology embedded governance.