Daijiworld Media Network - Chennai
Chennai, Sep 26: India can achieve economic growth of more than 10 per cent by leveraging technology and innovation across sectors, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Saturday, stressing that such growth would require greater efforts from all stakeholders to realise the vision of a Viksit Bharat by 2047.
Speaking at a fireside chat organised by the IIT Madras Alumni Association, Sitharaman said India had the potential to achieve the target but would need sustained efforts across sectors.
“We have too many naysayers. We have too many people who have vicarious pleasure being derived if India fails. We really cannot afford that. We need to nudge these people to think positively,” she said.
Sitharaman highlighted the growth of startups and said technological interventions had made a significant difference in connecting agricultural producers with markets and improving productivity.
She pointed to the use of drones and aerial geospatial technologies for precision mapping of land parcels, saying such interventions had empowered farmers.
The Finance Minister also cited the use of point-of-sale (POS) machines in fertiliser distribution as an example of technology-driven intervention.
Under a pilot project, the POS system records details of farmers, their land holdings and the crops being cultivated. It can then provide information on the quantity of fertiliser required based on soil, irrigation and crop conditions.
Sitharaman also unveiled the book *Cashless Nation: How UPI Changed Everything*, authored by Dr Santanu Paul and B Sambamurthy, at ‘Sangam 2026’, the annual conference of the IIT Madras Alumni Association and IIT Madras.
The book traces the transformation of India's digital payments ecosystem and documents the conception, development and rapid expansion of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Sitharaman had said last month that UPI was operational across 11 countries, including France, Singapore, the UAE, Greece and Mauritius.
“From powering seamless payments in India to enabling digital transactions across borders, UPI continues to take our digital public infrastructure to the world,” she had said.
She also said UPI-enabled payment points had increased around 260 times since 2018, expanding digital payments across the country and improving access and convenience.
Highlighting the scale of India's digital payments ecosystem, Sitharaman said one out of every two real-time digital payment transactions globally takes place in India.