Digital economy to grow almost twice as fast as overall economy: MeitY

India’s digital economy is expected to grow almost twice as fast as the overall economy, contributing to nearly one-fifth of national income by 2029-30, the ministry of electronics and information technology said in a report.In under six years, the share of digital economy will be larger than that of agriculture or manufacturing in the country. In the short run, the highest growth is likely to come from the growth of digital intermediaries and platforms, followed by higher digital diffusion and digitalisation of the rest of the economy, the report said.

When it comes to India, the domestic cloud services market and the global capability centre sector are the two fastest-growing segments. The adoption of artificial intelligence for streamlining operations, improving customer experience, and launching new services is likely to propel the cloud services market to a compounded annual growth rate of 24% over the 2024-27 period and may reach $20.3 billion, as per the ministry’s report.Among the many traditional sectors, like banking and financial services industry, retail, education, hospitality, and logistics, though there is digital growth, it is not necessarily uniform, it said. “For example, retail sales are digitalising much more than wholesale sales. Firms are also investing in digital methods for customer acquisition and business development. Chatbots and AI applications are fairly commonplace,” the ministry said.