📄 Abstract
Digitalisation, understood as the increasing penetration of internet connectivity, mobile telephony, and digital payment infrastructure into economic and social life, has been one of the defining structural changes in the Indian economy over the past decade. Flagship initiatives such as Digital India, the JAM trinity (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile), the roll-out of affordable 4G data services, and the launch of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in 2016 have together transformed India into one of the largest and fastest-growing digital economies in the world. This paper empirically examines the relationship between digitalisation and economic growth in India using secondary time-series data for the period 2017-18 to 2023-24, drawing on statistics published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). Total internet subscribers and the volume of UPI transactions are used as proxy indicators of digitalisation, and their relationship with the real GDP growth rate is examined using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and simple linear regression. The results show that digitalisation indicators, particularly UPI transaction volume, have grown at an extraordinary pace over this period, with UPI volume expanding at a compound annual growth rate of well over 100 per cent, while internet subscribers grew steadily at a more moderate pace. However, the simple contemporaneous statistical association between these digitalisation indicators and the annual GDP growth rate is found to be weak and not statistically significant, even though internet penetration and UPI adoption are themselves very strongly and significantly correlated with one another. The paper concludes that while digitalisation has fundamentally reshaped the payments and information landscape of the Indian economy, its translation into measurable aggregate output growth is likely to be gradual, sector-specific, and mediated by complementary factors such as financial inclusion, digital literacy, and enterprise-level technology adoption, rather than visible in a simple year-on-year statistical relationship.
🏷️ Keywords
📚 How to Cite:
Dr. Haralu Bullappa , DIGITALISATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY , Volume 12 , Issue 8, August 2026, International Journal of Global Economic Light (JGEL) , Pages: 23 - 30 , DOI: https://doi.org/10.36713/epra31312