On March 06, 2023, the Governor of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Shaktikanta Das launched the mission ‘Har Payment Digital’ as part of the Digital Payments Awareness Week (DPAW).
- Objective: To reinforce the ease and convenience of digital payments and facilitate onboarding of new consumers into the digital payment system.
- The mission would run till the period of Vision 2025.
- The theme of Vision 2025 was “E-Payments for Everyone, Everywhere and Everytime”.
Initiatives undertaken:
i.DPAW:
- The DPAW 2023 was being observed by RBI from March 6 to 12, 2023 to further deepen the usage of digital payments across India.
- The campaign theme of DPAW 2023 is “Digital Payment Apnao, Auron ko bhi Sikhao” (Adopt digital payments and Also teach others).
ii.Jan Bhagidari(People’s Participation): The regional offices of the RBI will conduct awareness and outreach programmes as part of ‘Jan Bhagidari’ events under the Indian G20 presidency.
iii.75 Digital Villages: RBI also plans to initiate a programme named ‘75 Digital Villages’ in observance of 75 years of Independence.
- Under the programme, 75 villages across India will be adopted by Payment System Operators (PSOs) to convert them into digital payment enabled villages.
Evolution of Digital Payment systems in India:
i.Since December 2022, Payment systems in India have crossed over 1000 crore transactions every month.
ii.UPI:
- UPI (Unified Payments Interface), the instant payment system developed by NPCI and launched in 2016 has now emerged as the most popular and preferred payment mode in India.
- Person to Person (P2P) as well as Person to Merchant (P2M) transactions in India accounting for 75% of the total digital payments.
- The volume of UPI transactions has increased from 0.45 crore in January 2017 to 804 crore in January 2023 and the value of UPI transactions has increased from just Rs 1,700 crore to Rs 12.98 lakh crore.
iii.Cross border linkage:
- The recent initiative of ‘UPI-PayNow linkage’ enables internationalisation of our payment systems and cross border linkage of fast payment systems of India and Singapore.
- The QR code based and UPI enabled P2M payments were enabled in Bhutan, Singapore and UAE.
- Recently, the visitors from G20 counties also to be onboarded to UPI without having a bank account in India.
iv.Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) has ensured migration of bill payments from cash / cheques to digital mode. The National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) System facilitated migration of the toll payments to digital mode. The National Automated Clearing House (NACH) system has enabled Government Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT) payments digitally.
v.As per the recent pan-India digital payments survey (covering 90,000 respondents) around 42% of respondents have used digital payments.35 per cent were non-users though aware of digital payments while 23 per cent were not aware.
Note – Department of Payment and Settlement Systems (DPSS) of the RBI is celebrating its 18th anniversary (it was formed on March 7, 2005).
Recent Related News:
HDFC Bank has become the 1st private sector bank in India to enable its customers to use (link) their RuPay Credit Card on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with the BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) App and other UPI-enabled apps.
About Reserve Bank of India (RBI)
Governor – Shaktikanta Das
Deputy Governors – Mahesh Kumar Jain, Michael Debabrata Patra, M. Rajeshwar Rao, T. Rabi Sankar
Establishment – 1st April 1935
Headquarters – Mumbai, Maharashtra
