The Reserve Bank of India launched a digital payments awareness week (DPAW) with a mission, “Har Payment Digital,” from March 6 to 12, 2023, to promote online transactions.
This year’s campaign is “Digital Payment Apnao, Auron ko bhi Sikhao” (Adopt digital payments and Also teach others).
Digital payments offer the benefits of speed, convenience, safety, and security. While the existing infrastructure has made digital payments accessible, it is necessary to create more awareness to boost adoption, it said in a press release this week.
RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das appealed to all stakeholders—banks, non-banks, payment system operators, digital payment users, etc., to adopt digital payments as part of the mission “Har Payment Digital” and teach others about their merits to encourage people to become a user.
During the awareness week, RBI’s regional offices will conduct awareness and outreach programmes as part of the ‘Jan Bhagidari’ events under the Indian G20 presidency. Similar initiatives will be undertaken by the bank and non-bank payment system operators.
RBI will also initiate a ‘75 Digital Villages’ programme to celebrate 75 years of India’s independence. Under this programme, Payment System Operators (PSOs) will adopt 75 villages across the country and convert them into digital payment-enabled villages.
The central bank said the mission reinforces RBI’s commitment to deepen digital payments in the country.
Das also congratulated RBI’s Department of Payment and Settlement Systems (DPSS) on its 18th anniversary (formed on March 7, 2005). He said, “Our payment systems have evolved, and now we have multiple systems facilitating instant payments. India’s payment systems are talked about globally, and several countries have shown interest in replicating India’s success story.
India’s payment systems have witnessed over 1000 crore transactions every month since December 2022, he said, stressing that “this speaks volumes of the robustness of our payments ecosystem and acceptance by consumers. A recent pan-India digital payments survey covering 90,000 respondents revealed that 42 per cent of respondents had used digital payments.
Launched in 2016, UPI has emerged as the most popular payment mode in India, pioneering Person to Person (P2P) and Person to Merchant (P2M) transactions, accounting for 75 per cent of the total digital payments.
The UPI transaction volume has increased from 0.45 crore in January 2017 to 804 crore in January 2023. The UPI transaction value has also increased from just Rs 1,700 crore to Rs 12.98 lakh crore in the same period. Das said the digital payments awareness week will further “deepen the usage and footprint of digital payments across the country”.
