Cabinet Approves INR 2600 Crore Scheme To Promote RuPay Debit Cards And Low-Value BHIM-UPI Under the scheme, banks will be provided financial incentives for promoting Point of Sale (PoS) and e-commerce transactions using RuPay and UPI in the current financial year
By Teena Jose
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The Cabinet on Wednesday approved an INR 2,600 crore scheme for promoting RuPay debit cards and low-value BHIM-UPI transactions. Under the scheme, banks will be provided financial incentives for promoting Point of Sale (PoS) and e-commerce transactions using RuPay and UPI in the current financial year, according to a PTI report.
"India's strides in digital payments will be further strengthened by today's Cabinet decision regarding promotion of RuPay Debit Cards and BHIM-UPI transactions," said Narendra Modi in a tweet.
The decision regarding the scheme was taken in the meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The aim to formulate such a scheme is that it would help in building a robust digital payment ecosystem and also promote UPI Lite and UPI123PAY as economical and user-friendly digital payments, as per the report.
Briefing reporters after the Cabinet meeting, Union Minister Bhupender Yadav, as quoted in the report, said that this will help in taking the digital payment system to MSMEs, the unorganised sector and farmers.
Referring to the earlier statistics, the report further added that in 2021-22, the government approved an incentive scheme in compliance with the budget announcement of 2021-22 to give a boost to digital transactions. In the 2022-23 Budget, the government announced its intent to continue the financial support. In addition to this, it also revealed that the total digital payments transactions have registered a year-on-year growth of 59 per cent, rising from 5,554 crore in 2020-21 to 8,840 crore in FY 2021-22.
With regard to the recent reports, it is evident that the acceptance for UPI is getting to a larger extent. As a part of this, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) MD and CEO Dilip Asbe, earlier this week had said that several countries had expressed their intent to adopt home-grown Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and India will provide the technical know-how, software and handholding support to these countries.
Today, it is also reported that non-resident Indians (NRIs) will soon be able to make payments in Unified Payments Interface (UPI) without having to get an Indian mobile number. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has allowed NRIs in 10 countries to digitally transfer funds using the UPI platform from NRE/NRO accounts.
