MUMBAI: The RBI on Friday deferred the mandatory implementation of Aadhar-enabled Point of Sale (PoS) machines by six months, saying there is currently a limited capacity to produce such devices.
"It has been brought to our notice that the rate of deployment of acceptance infrastructure has slowed down owing to the mismatch between demand and supply of such Aadhaar-enabled devices. Therefore, on a review, it has been decided to extend the time for deployment of Aadhaar-enabled devices till June 30, 2017," the Reserve Bank said in a notification to all commercial banks, payments banks, authorised card payment networks and ATM operators.
"The instructions contained in our circular of September 29, 2016, are for deployment of new card acceptance infrastructure. As regards enablement of existing card acceptance infrastructure for processing payment transactions using Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, the timeline will be advised in due course," the circular added.
On September 29, RBI had issued a circular saying Aadhar-enabled PoS devices were to be mandatorily installed by January 2017.
Following the demonetisation of high denomination currency on November 8, there is overall much pressure to install PoS terminals for cashless transactions.