New Delhi (NVI): India’s central bank, the Reserve of India (RBI) has mooted a path-breaking proposal under which digitally-savvy citizens may not have to pay any charges for transactions done through the National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) system from next year.
Aiming at giving impetus to digital transactions, RBI has also proposed that FASTags would be enabled to pay for parking fee and even at fuel stations.
For the record, digital payments constituted a high 96 per cent of total non-cash retail payments during the October 2018 to September 2019. During the same period, the NEFT and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) systems handled 252 crore and 874 crore transactions with year on year growth of 20 per cent and 263 per cent, respectively.
In a statement, the central bank said: “This rapid growth in the payment systems, inter-alia, has been facilitated by a series of measures taken by the Reserve Bank of India.”
The RBI said that to facilitate a further “Exceptional (e) Payment Experience”, it proposes to “mandate banks not to charge savings bank account customers for online transactions in the NEFT system with effect from January 2020”.
It also plans to operationalise the ‘Acceptance Development Fund’ to increase acceptance infrastructure with effect from January 1, 2020.
Further, the central bank has plans to permit all authorised payment systems and instruments (non-bank PPIs, cards and UPI) for linking with National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) FASTags.
“Going forward, this will facilitate the use of FASTags for parking, fuel, etc, payments in an interoperable environment,” the statement said.
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