Digital inclusion is leading to financial inclusion: iSpirt’s Sharad Sharma

New Delhi: The goods and services tax (GST), when further simplified, is set to become a registry of all the matched invoices that a business is involved in, according to Sharad Sharma, co-founder of the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSpirt), which helps software products businesses scale.

“GST will be good for all business-to-business (B2B) players. Another platform called the BBPS (Bharat Bill Payment System) will create the same digital trail for businesses that service customers,” said Sharma at the emerging technology conference, EmTech India 2018, in Gurgaon on 8 March.

According to Sharma, India is the first country in the world to completely digitize flight plans for drones and “we are a couple of months away” from this being launched.

“Creation of new technologies for India in these new areas is allowing the country to become data-rich before we become economically rich,” he added. “Digital inclusion is leading to financial inclusion,” said Sharma, referring to the high volume of Aadhaar-based transactions in India.

India is also formulating a new consent framework which will be announced as a new law later this year, Sharma said, adding that “the technology for this new law is already available in India. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will announce this as the account aggregator policy.”

This law will impact not just the financial sector but also healthcare. “The health kernel called the health stack will change the game over the next 10 years and possibly make us the first country to attempt to be healthy before becoming wealthy,” said Sharma.

These underlying societal platforms and consented flow of data will transform multiple areas in the country, he said.