India will soon be digital payment society: Finance Ministry
New Delhi, Sep 3 : With monthly transactions crossing 300 million mark through Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Finance Ministry officials on Monday said digital payment will soon be the norm in the country.
"Digitalisation of payments in India is marching ahead with gusto. With base of 100 million Indians connected with digital payment ecosystem rising at a fast clip, India will soon be a digital payment society," Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg on Monday said in a tweet.
UPI, the real-time bank-to-bank payment system on mobile platform launched in 2016, registered 312.02 million transactions in August, up 32 per cent from 235.65 million transactions in July, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) said on Saturday.
In terms of transaction value, the money transferred through India's flagship payments platform went up 18 per cent to Rs 54,212.26 crore in August from Rs 45,845.64 crore in July, said the NPCI, which developed the platform, in its monthly update on UPI.
The data does not include transactions with debit or credit in the same account for the month of August, it said. It had directed banks to stop transactions from different UPI applications with debit and credit happening in the same account from August 1 to prevent artificial transactions by fintech companies to increase UPI numbers.
Financial Services Secretary Rajeev Kumar said the spurt in digital transactions reflects changing consumer behaviour and wider adoption of the technology in society.
"Digital India making deep inroads into consumer behaviour. BHIM UPI txns show increasing user adoption month on month. Aug '18 txn count/value up by 32.7% & 18% over July '18. Building a less-cash and financially-inclusive economy," Kumar tweeted.
In a year's time, the number of banks attached to UPI has gone up from 55 in August 2017 to 114 in August 2018. Year-on-year, the volume of transactions shot up 19 times from 16.6 million in August 2017 to 312 million last month, the NPCI data revealed.
To make UPI more attractive, NPCI, which is owned by a consortium of major banks, launched UPI 2.0 last month that allows banks to introduce more facilities like linking customers' overdraft accounts with UPI and checking invoice before payment.
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Two injuries, one DNF, a DQ as India end messy World Relays campaign
Gaborone (Botswana) (PTI): Amoj Jacob and Ragul Kumar got injured during the men's 4x400m and 4x100 races respectively as India ended their World Athletics Relays campaign in disappointment on the second day of competitions here on Sunday.
The Indian camp had high hopes of making the 2027 World Championships in the men's 4x400m relay but the team did not finish (DNF) the race as Jacob suffered cramps and pulled out of the race after taking the baton from the first leg runner Dharamveer Choudhary. Rajesh Ramesh and Vishal TK were to run in the third and fourth legs.
Those teams which could not qualify for the 2027 Beijing World Championships by reaching the final round of each of the six relay events on Saturday were given another chance in the second qualification round on Sunday.
The top two teams in each of the two heats (in all six relay events) booked the Beijing ticket on Sunday.
India will now have to try and qualify for the World Championships through the Top Lists of the World Athletics, which is a long and tedious process.
In the men's 4x100m race, third leg runner Ragul Kumar fell down the track after failing to hand over the baton inside the exchange zone to fourth leg runner Gurindervir Singh, which clearly showed the lack of coordination among the runners.
Harsh Santosh Raut and Animesh Kujur ran the first two legs.
The Indian quartet was disqualified and Kumar was seen being taken away from the Field of Play with the help of the volunteers.
It was a comedy of errors in the case of the women's 4x100m race, which saw the baton being dropped during an exchange between first leg runner Tamanna and second runner Nithya Gandhe, though the Indians finished the race in 53.09 seconds.
Gandhe started running quite a distance, but after realising that the baton was not in her hand, she turned and ran back to pick it up.
The only silver-lining for the Indian contingent was the national record time in the mixed 4x100m relay race, though the quartet of Ragul Kumar, Nithya Gandhe, Animesh Kujur and Sneha SS finished sixth in heat number two with a time of 41.35 seconds, bettering the previous national mark of 42.30 seconds set in March in Chandigarh.
The mixed 4x400m relay quartet of Theerthesh P Shetty, Kumari Saloni, Nihal William and Rashdeep Kaur ended at fifth in heat number one with a time of 3 minutes and 19.40 seconds.
On Saturday, all the five Indian relay teams had failed to make it to the respective final rounds and thus missed out on the 2027 World Championships berths.
