IT czar Nandan Nilekani today said "formalisation" of the economy will happen not by large companies hiring thousands of employees, but by harnessing individual entrepreneurs.
"...Formalisation of Indian economy will happen, not by large companies hiring thousands of employees, but by networks, being agile and flexible, and by harnessing individual entrepreneurs and giving them access to credit, skills, markets, social security and so on," he said.
Speaking at an event organised by 4TiGO,a logistics startup supported by him, to announce the start of its operations, he said lot of people believed that "we will have largecompanies and employment and all that stuff".
But to address the problem of employment and entrepreneurship, ways should be found to aggregate millions of small producers of different kinds into platforms.
Citing Ola, Uber, Amazon and Flipkart as examples forthis, he said, "Why this is important is because, platformsenable people to move from the informal economy to formaleconomy...By giving them access to market, credit and social security."
Such platforms offer source of business and result in digital trail of activitybetween platform and the provider. The ability to combine platforms, suppliers,credit and so on is really going to be the future of how Indiaevolves, and "we visualise this happening in every industry."
"How do the small players get aggregated? They become the part of digital foot print, which will lead to credit, credit leading to growth and the platform will also provide market- so this is how we need to think about the future. I think this is the way that we are really going to drive change in this country," he added.
Nilekani also said it was because of all theseactivities,
India is going from data poor to data rich veryquickly.
Pointing out that the whole area of credit is going tochange "dramatically", Nilekani said that the country will see a whole newera of data driven lending.
He said "historically credit was undeserved to small businesses and small consumers, but now the digitaltransparency that has come has enabled businesses andindividuals to get access to credit..."
On 4TiGO he said "idea is really part of the largersort of the narrative that we are all working on, which is how can we use the power of the modern network to transformIndia.
Currently, 4TiGO has set up operations in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, AndhraPradesh, Telangana, Kerala and Goa.
It plans 100per cent coverage of the country within the next 12-18 months.
