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The Central Government believes that this is not the right time to make digital payments chargeable. The statement was made by Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently.
According to Sitharaman, the Government sees digital payments as a public good, and therefore, it is not the right time to make them chargeable. The minister further said India can achieve a level of transparency, through digitization.
“We (Centre) see digital payments as the public good. We feel that people should be able to access it freely so that the digitisation of the Indian economy becomes attractive. We can also achieve a level of transparency through digitisation", she said.
“Therefore, we still think it is not the right time to make it chargeable. We are more and more pushing toward open digital transactions, digitisation, and platforms that can enable great access. The RBI’s recommendation is to a working paper and lets the working paper where it is," Sitharaman added.
The statement was made in response to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) seeking feedback from the people on the various charges proposed in the payments system, including the possibility of imposing tiered charges on transactions done through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
The RBI discussion paper said that UPI as a fund transfer system is like IMPS, and therefore, it could be argued that the charges in UPI need to be similar to charges in IMPS for fund transfer transactions.
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