NEW DELHI: Indian Railways is finding it difficult to achieve 100 crore digital transactions target set by the Centre for financial year 2017-18 and has asked the ministry of electronics and information technology (MEITY), the nodal ministry, to bring it down to 80 crore.
Giving a push to Digital India campaign post demonetization in November 2016, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley in his budget speech had announced that a mission will be set up with a target of 2,500 crore digital transactions for 2017-18 through UPI, USSD, Aadhar Pay, IMPS and debit cards.
After the announcement, MEITY had issued targets to all central ministries, PSUs and central banks among others to achieve the target. At present such transactions stand at nearly 1600 core.
Railways combined targets, including six metros, stands at 225 crore transactions. Of this Indian Railways has been asked to make 100 crore digital transactions from the current 60 crore.
“We are still negotiating with the MEITY and have informed that how difficult it is to achieve. We have asked them that it should be kept 80 crore for us rather than 100 crore,” said a senior railway board officer.
He said that post demonetization railway has already installed 7000 POS (point of sale) machines and target is to install above 30,000 for financial year 2017-18.
Indian Railways freight segment transactions are 99.5 percent cashless and the focus is now on the passenger segment.
“Railways public transactions, staff salaries, contracts are all digital. But these are very less and so we will get numbers from passenger transactions,” said the official.
Railways make 60 crore digital transaction annually and of these 30 crore transactions are made through unreserved ticketing system (UTS) while 24 crore transactions through e-ticketing.
The MEITY recently has also conducted a meeting with industry associations for promotion of digital payments.