CareEdge Global Ratings has ranked India’s digital public infrastructure among the world’s 10 most effective reform stories, citing its scale, interoperability and impact on financial inclusion.
India’s digital public infrastructure, anchored by Aadhaar and the Unified Payments Interface, has been named among the world’s 10 most effective structural reform stories in a CareEdge Global Ratings assessment that reviewed 43 reform cases across 38 countries. The report placed 10 reforms in the top tier as highly effective, while nine were judged moderately effective, 15 remained works in progress and nine were classed as least effective.
The findings point to the sheer scale of India’s digital rails. Aadhaar now covers more than 1.3 billion people, or about 95% of the population, while UPI handles more than 13 billion transactions a month. Together, they have helped reduce transaction costs, widen access to formal finance and make it easier for individuals and businesses to use digital services.
CareEdge said the impact is especially visible among micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, where more than 85% of transactions now take place digitally. That shift has brought more businesses into the formal economy and strengthened the link between payments, banking and public services. Elsewhere, the report noted that digital adoption is also spreading through the smaller business sector, with other industry research showing rising use of UPI and Aadhaar-enabled banking in semi-urban and rural retail operations.
Nitesh Jain, chief rating officer at CareEdge Global Ratings, said India’s digital infrastructure has helped remove long-standing barriers that kept many people outside the formal economy. Speaking in the report, he said the system has tackled dependence on cash, limited access to bank accounts and formal credit, and weak delivery infrastructure for financial services and welfare payments. The report also credited institutional coordination and interoperability for the model’s expansion, saying cooperation among government agencies, regulators, banks, payment networks and fintech companies has been central to its success.
More broadly, the report found that Europe and Asia-Pacific accounted for eight of the 10 highly effective reforms, with four cases each. Those included tax digitalisation in Greece, Germany’s debt brake, banking reforms in Cyprus and Project Repeal in the Philippines. But it also warned that reform announcements alone do not guarantee durable results, arguing that implementation, sequencing, clear accountability and political backing are what determine whether policy changes deliver measurable gains.
Looking ahead, CareEdge said governments will need to adapt to new pressures from artificial intelligence, critical technologies, supply-chain risks, climate change and the infrastructure demands of digital growth. The report’s message was that India’s experience shows how a common digital foundation can serve multiple economic and administrative purposes at once, but also that sustaining those gains will require continued institutional discipline and policy follow-through.
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