IMC 2019: 'Post-demonetisation digital payments have been encouraging'

The ongoing Indian Mobile Congress has witnessed Ravi Shankar Prasad – Union Minister for Communications, Electronics and IT present interesting statistics regarding digital payments in India. These, as known have received a massive boost ever since demonetisation was resorted to by the Indian government during November 2016. With digital India – in which digital payments are a major pillar having received a massive fillip, it only becomes worth taking a look at the number of digital payment transactions now. Check these out below.  

Post-demonetisation digital payments transaction numbers

Announcing these at the ongoing IMC 2019, Prasad stated that the number of digital payments transactions have risen to 3.32 billion. This number was 980 million, during November 2016 (the demonetisation month). These are definitely encouraging numbers. Under these situations, digital payments do have their advantages when it comes to saving precious resources – such as time for people who otherwise had to go through undesirable stress with respect to accumulating the right amount of cash required to carry out specific transactions.  

With digital payments, the “change problem” which was quintessential has now been eliminated in various scenarios. For instance, If you buy vegetables from a vendor (even from a roadside vendor), you could do an instant money transfer through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) applications (apps) such as Google Pay and PayTM. Today, most vendors (even small vendors) have signed up for Point-of-Sale (PoS) machines that credit money from customers directly to the bank accounts of vendors that are linked. Here, you could simply enter the exact money on Google Pay and do a transfer. You would not be fretting for change, neither would the vendor with you. If you are lucky, base don your transactions, you could also earn cashbacks that are directly credited to your account. Imagine the time you saved. You even got some extra money in your account.  

Likewise, digital payments are desirable when it comes to resorting to paying utility bills. All these are one-click on interfaces (apps) like Google Pay. You are even informed, of exact bill amounts, via alerts, so you could instantly make this payment and rest assured. Then, in times of emergency, digital payments come in handy. Traditional wire transfers (NEFT, RTGS) are generally time consuming. Simply use a digital payment app, and send/receive money instantly, even across cities. Finally, with the Minister having presented statistics, digital payments could now even penetrate the rural and tier-2, tier-3 markets in India towards eliminating cash as the only medium of exchange, thereby having a set electronic record; these could come in handy while detecting corruption cases.  

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