Naidu chants incentives mantra
The 13-member committee constituted to digitise the economy headed by AP Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu in its interim report submitted to Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Tuesday suggested increased incentives for digital cash transactions through Aadhaar, credit and debit card payments and mobile transactions as a measure to tread the digitization path.
CMs’ panel submits report to PM on digital payments
New Delhi: The 13-member committee constituted to digitise the economy headed by AP Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu in its interim report submitted to Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Tuesday suggested increased incentives for digital cash transactions through Aadhaar, credit and debit card payments and mobile transactions as a measure to tread the digitization path.
Merchants and small players must be given additional incentives in the form of rebates, etc, it stated. Providing insurance to all mobile transactions was also mooted to protect consumer interest.
A subsidy of 50 per cent on smartphones should be given and all service charges and fee on digital transactions should be waived to encourage the same. A tax could be contemplated on transactions exceeding Rs 3,000 in cash in future to encourage people to go digital completely.
Experiments in this regard in the past had failed because the necessary infrastructure and technology were not present in the past. Today with the biometric, Iris technology and finger print facilitated transactions could be the new norm, the 11-page report said.
Disclosing this to the media, Naidu said here on Tuesday evening after submitting the report to the Prime Minister that they had also suggested that the new Aadhaar payment App should be linked to all the Aadhaar numbers with bank accounts without fail.
The recently launched Unified Payments Interface (UPI) which allows the user to send and receive money by using Virtual Payment Address (VPA) along with Aadhaar App should bring all accounts in all the banks into the planned system. At present about 40 crore accounts are already linked to the accounts.
While this App (Aadhaar App) eliminated the fee payments for service providers like MasterCard and Visa, all fee payments on digital transactions should be eliminated the report recommended.
A subsidy should be given for smart phones to encourage users across India to go digital way, it suggested while all Government to Government transfers should be through online only.
This new Aadhaar Payment merchant app would take away the plastic cards and the Point of Sale (PoS) machines. The app launched on December 25, 2016 would also eliminate the fee payments for service providers like MasterCard and Visa.
Recalling that the digital financial transactions made through Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) mode had grown exponentially by 3,574% and 1,060%, respectively, till January 18, the report said it should further be expanded by every means.
Awareness drive along with training in digital payments must be strengthened through societies and organizations within the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology such as National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology and National Informatics Center (NIC), the report pointed out.
Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) had witnessed several million downloads in the country in a span of just few days and its further updated versions and applications were to be released in near future so that it becomes the mainstay for undertaking financial transactions throughout the economy sooner than envisaged earlier, it reportedly suggested.
The report is also hopeful that digital payment would generate a transparent economy and would enhance direct and indirect tax collections by at least 25 per cent in the country.
The interim report which suggested the road ahead for the country is hopeful that the country would overcome the problems in a short time because right now about 74 crore debit and credit cards are being used, while about half a billion population is using internet, there are 102 crore mobile phones, 110 crore Aadhaar and more than 20 crore Jan-Dhan accounts.
So, Naidu added, the complete ecosystem had already been put in place for using digital payment mode.Earlier, the meeting was attended by the Chief Ministers of Sikkim (Pawan Kumar Chamling), Haryana (Manohar Lal Khattar), Madhya Pradesh (Shvraj Singh Chouhan) and Maharashtra CM (Devendra Phadnavis) and NITI Aayog vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya, CEO Amitabh Kant and Nandan Nilekani.
