Tech pioneer and billionaire Bill Gates has appreciated India’s digital health ID system, saying it would help in securing equitable, accessible healthcare delivery and accelerate progress on India’s health goals, in one of his twitter posts congratulating PM Narendra Modi for the launch of the Ayushman Digital Mission.
“If people are going to study one country right now, other than China, I’d say they should look at India,” Gates said at the Singapore Fintech Festival. “Things are really exploding there and innovation around that system is phenomenal.”
Gates appreciated the policies that India has built for universal identification and digital payments, including the world’s largest biometric database and a system for sending rupees between any bank or smartphone app, saying that it has drastically reduced the cost and friction of distributing aid to the poor, especially during the pandemic.
Thanking to Gates tweet, the PM added “The Mission will not only make the processes of hospitals simplified but also will increase ease of living. Under this, every citizen will now get a digital health ID and their health record will be digitally protected,” he said.
Speaking about the Covid-19 pandemic, Gates said he hopes that vaccines will put an end to it in 2022. “We can’t forget that another pandemic will come, so we need to invest and be ready,” he said. “Digital things overall — remote learning, telemedicine, digital finance — were greatly advanced. So even though the pandemic has been terrible, it has pushed some of these innovations including how quickly we make vaccines.”