Zero Charges For Online Payments, 24*7 RTGS, NEFT – Nandan Nilekani’s Suggestions For Digital India

RBI formed a panel whose profile was to suggest changes in the system that will help enhance the overall situation of digital transactions in India. This panel, headed by Nandan Nilekani, has suggested some innovative techniques that will help boost the growth of digital transactions by ten times in the coming years.

Among a long list of suggestions, some of them stand out the most. What are these suggestions? Read on to know all the details!

Definite Decrease in Cash Requirement

Nandan Nilekani, the head of the team of five members, is a former Infosys chairman and Aadhaar architect. The report made by the team, called Report of the High Level Committee on Deepening of Digital Payments, was submitted to the Governor of India, Shaktikanta Das.

As per the report, “The committee noted the recent growth in volume of digital payments by a factor of 10 over five years and has set a target for additional growth of 10x in three years. This growth will be driven by a shift from high value, low volume, high cost transactions to low value, high volume, low cost transactions.”

It also says that in the long run, there will be a definite decrease in the requirement of cash.

Suggestions by the Committee

Here are some of the primary suggestions made by the committee:

• The committee suggested that the payments made via any digital mode to any of the Government agencies should not be levied with extra charges and convenience fees. There was a report previously that suggested that a particular type of digital transaction, UPI, will be applied some suitable charges after a fixed number of transactions, and yet this seems to be a suggestion in contrast to that.
• The committee also proposed that customers should be able to conduct a reasonable number of digital transactions without charges.
• Another suggestion put forth by the committee is that the facilities of RTGS and NEFT should be open to customers around the clock.
• The import duty levied on POS should be made nil for a certain period of time, so that it will be installed at every vendor. The current rate of import on POS machines is 18%.
• Introduce a competitive Merchant Discount Rates (MDR) pricing structure, which will reduce the cost for the customers.

Do you think these suggestions by the committee will boost the rate of digital transactions in India? Let us know in the comments section right below!