In an effort to clean up the system and weed out the menace of unaccounted money and corruption, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has made some important announcements today while reading out the budget in the Parliament. One of the most important initiatives among those is the launch of a Merchant enabled Aadhaar-based payment system to promote digital transactions for people living in the hinterland.
This Aadhaar linked system will be a vital tool in the Government’s demonetization plan and although details about the working of such a payment system aren’t available yet, it will be beneficial to those who do not own debit cards, mobile wallets or mobile phones. While presenting the budget, Mr Jaitley said, “Promotion of digital economy is an integral part of the Government’s strategy, it has a transformational impact in terms of greater formalisation of the economy and mainstreaming the financial system into the budget system. This, in turn, is expected to energise private investment in the country through lower cost of credit. India is now at the cusp of a massive digital revolution. A shift to digital platform has huge benefits to the common man.”
The Finance ministry will setup a mission that will target over 2,500 crore digital transactions for 2017-18 through UPI, USSD, Aadhaar Pay, IMPS and debit cards. Also, banks have been assigned with a target to introduce additional 10 lakh point-of-sale terminals by March 2017 and 20 lakh Aadhaar based POS terminals by September 2017.