Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar Forecasts Digital Economy's Contribution To Exceed 20% Of India's GDP by 2026

Bengaluru, Aug 17 (KNN) The Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Thursday said that the digital economy will contribute more than 20 per cent of the country’s GDP in 2026.

Speaking at the ‘G20 Digital Innovation Alliance Summit’ in Bengaluru, the union minister said, “the digital economy has gone from 4-4.5 per cent in 2014 of the total GDP to 11 per cent of the total GDP today. And we expect the digital economy to contribute over 20 per cent of our GDP by 2026.”

“India is a preeminent nation that adopted technology very fast and has started offering solutions to the world,” he said.

 The minister added that at this pace of digitalisation, we are now looking at every citizen, every consumer consuming digital products or services, whether it is Instagram reels or Digital Public Infrastructure that connect them to the government and governance, or using the cloud and all of the upstream and downstream impacts that are created by this space and trend of digitalisation.

Chandrasekhar pointed out ‘the centre of gravity of tech’, which used to be in a few countries and centred on a few corporations and a few companies is moving to open source systems to younger and younger startups that are disrupting the normal.

Lauding Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his vision of maximum usage of digital technology, Chandrasekhar said that he called the coming decade as a ‘Techade’, a decade of technology opportunities.

“In a lot of ways our Prime Minister exhorted young Indians that ‘the India Techade’ will be built by, architected by, designed by, innovated by determination, energy, creativity of young startups around the country and around the world,” Chandrasekhar said.  (KNN Bureau)