The world around us is enveloped with gadgets of all kinds. We use mobile apps to travel new places, use internet banking to send money to others, mobile banking to do the same with frugal technology and wallets a newly emerging class of bank accounts used to transact for small amounts.
Trends suggest that internet banking is growing at more than 30% in India and the number of unique users crossed 40 million recently(June,2015). This number is nearly 20% of the regular internet users in the country which has crossed 200 million. A majority of the internet users are accessing the internet through their mobiles.
More than 100 million Indians are on Facebook. Internet access remains way too slow and expensive. Its been only five or ten years since common men and women in India other than techies started using the internet.
Apart from keeping in touch with friends via social networks people are using internet for net banking which has caused a lot of excitement in the banking industry. People don't visit banks as much as they would otherwise and there is a perceptible fall in branch footfalls. Tech savvy investors are dabbling in stock markets and benefiting immensely from internet for transactions.
For a large number of internet users who travel in trains, online railway ticket booking is a very useful activity. Several travel and hotel room booking sites like makemytrip, travelguru etc have made travel easier.
Mobile bill payment, Insurance premium payment, movie ticket booking, air ticket booking, electricity bill payments, property tax payments and a variety of unheard uses of internet banking has made it a must have. I advise those unwilling to take the plunge to try it soon.
Online shopping sites like flipkart, amazon, ebay, snapdeal, myntra etc are doing roaring business. New startups with unique concepts are being launched every day. Students of computer science are gung ho about android app development and working hard to get premium positions in the industry.
Sky is the limit for the digital revolution currently played out and its causing lot of changes in the lifestyle of people. Digital India with the slogan of presence less and paper less governance promises the sky for the people. Aadhaar has been a mixed success so far as its utility as a financial address is yet to be fully realized. It would be good to avoid the pitfalls and use this technology only for the benefits that it promises and not as a tool to harass or intimidate people.
