For India, digitization is a part, although a large part, of the country’s ambitious modernization program.
“India is building a digital country and I think that’s what is going to serve it well over the next decade,” wrote Ajay Krishnan, lead portfolio manager for the $425 million Wasatch Emerging Markets Select Fund, in a report released in May 2022. Investment analysts from Wasatch Global Investors, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, have been visiting India for more than 20 years and think it has already accomplished substantial digitization and is poised for more rapid growth.
“Investors under-appreciate India’s digitization push,” Krishnan says. Over the past five years, India’s government expanded broadband internet infrastructure and created a public digital-payments system so everyone has a bank account as well as a secure, cloud-based digital locker to store, share, and verify documents. Combine that push with a young, digitally savvy population, and India is starting a virtuous cycle that could last for years to come,” he wrote.