With the use of cash remaining unabated, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) wants to Indians to use more debit cards to boost digital transactions. Over the next two years, as it attempts to improve the card acceptance infrastructure, the central bank hopes to increase cashless transactions by at least 34 per cent in point of sale (PoS) terminals to 50 lakh by 2021 from the current 37 lakh. “Given the current growth trend, it is expected to have 5 million active PoS by end 2021,” RBI said in its Vision document released last week.
It added that along with digital PoS or QR code systems, which are also expected to increase substantially, the entire card acceptance infrastructure will be improved six times the present level by end of 2021 to drive their vision for a cash-lite economy and shift Cash on Delivery (CoD) transactions to digital modes for e-commerce.
The vision document proposes a safe, secure, convenient, quick and affordable e-payment system as it expects the number of digital transactions to increase more than four times to 8,707 crore in December 2021. Debit card and credit card transactions through PoS for March, 2019 stood at Rs 5,30,111 crore and Rs 5,76,511 crore respectively against Rs 4,18,567 crore and Rs 4,43,081 crore respectively for March, 2018.
According to the vision document, payment systems like UPI/IMPS are likely to register average annualised growth of over 100 per cent and NEFT at 40 per cent over the vision period (up to December 2021).(With agency inputs)