On the occasion of 18th anniversary of Department of Payment and Settlement Systems (DPSS), Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) governor Shaktikanta Das launched the mission ‘Har Payment Digital’ in Mumbai.
This was also to mark the beginning of Digital Payments Awareness Week that kicked off on March 6 and would end on March 12.
At the launch, he emphasises on the popularity of UPI as the popular and preferred payment mode and also about the robustness of our payments’ ecosystem and acceptance by consumers.
“Payment systems witnessed over 1000 crore transactions every month since December 2022. A recent pan-India digital payments survey (covering 90,000 respondents) revealed that 42 percent of respondents have used digital payments,” RBI's governor highlighted.
On one hand where UPI allowed digital payments to small merchants such as retail outlets, kirana stores, nationwide, the Bharat Bill Payment System — at the same time — ensured migration of bill payments from cash to digital mode without any hassle and National Electronic Toll Collection System enabled the migration of toll payments to digital mode.
“Launched in 2016, UPI has emerged as the most popular and preferred payment mode in India pioneering Person to Person (P2P) as well as Person to Merchant (P2M) transactions in India accounting for 75 percent of the total digital payments. The volume of UPI transactions has increased multi fold from 0.45 crore in January 2017 to 804 crore in January 2023. The value of UPI transactions has increased from just ₹1,700 crore to ₹12.98 lakh crore during the same period,” he added.
Cross border payments
Digital Payments Awareness Week is likely to further deepen the usage and footprint of digital payments across the country.
He also highlighted that a number of initiatives have been taken for internationalisation of payment systems and cross border linkage of fast payment systems of India and Singapore i.e., UPI-PayNow.
This was in addition to the QR-code based and UPI enabled P2M payments that are happening in Bhutan, Singapore and UAE. Lately, visitors from G20 countries were enabled to be onboarded to UPI without having a bank account in India.
“Through this initiative, the G20 delegates had a first-hand experience of making merchant payments seamlessly through the UPI, during their stay in India,” he said.
What is Har Payment Digital?
The mission of Har Payment Digital has a goal of reinforcing the ease and convenience of digital payments and to ensure onboarding of new consumers into the digital fold.
Under this mission, a number of campaigns underscoring the digital payment channels are being planned by the banks and non-banking institutions.
“Our Regional Offices will be taking up Jan Bhagidari activities to promote the acceptance and use of digital payments under the G20 theme of promoting digital public infrastructure during Indian presidency,” he said.
He also highlighted that the payments ecosystem has variety of payment systems that have facilitated migration to digital.
