India’s push to build a less-cash economy seems to be gathering momentum with the central bank recording a phenomenal growth in digital transactions till March 2019 and setting an ambitious target to push up the volumes by four times by 2021.
Total digital transactions in volume terms recorded a growth rate of 58.8 per cent during 2018-19, on top of a growth of 50.4 per cent during 2017-18, the Reserve Bank of India said in a report.
The RBI says digital transactions in value terms grew by 19.5 per cent during 2018-19, compared to the growth of 22.2 per cent during 2017-18. Though the bulk of digital transactions in value terms (82.8 per cent) are accounted for by RTGS transactions, retail component of digital transactions (excluding RTGS customers and interbank transactions) witnessed a volume growth of 59.3 per cent during 2018-19, as against 50.8 per cent growth in the previous year.
According to the RBI, volumes under UPI, an instant real-time payment system, reached a peak of 799.5 million in March 2019, 4.5 times the volume in March 2018.
For the fiscal as whole, the total UPI volume was six times larger than the volume during 2017-18. In terms of value, UPI transactions witnessed an eight-fold increase over the previous year. The average value per transaction stood at Rs 1,670 in March 2019, the RBI said.
The volume of cards in point-of-sale (PoS) transactions grew 30.1 per cent during 2018-19 (36.2 per cent last year) and in value terms, by 30.2 per cent (39.6 per cent last year). During 2018-19, debit cards grew by 19.5 per cent and 16.3 per cent in volume and value terms (9 per cent and 24.9 per cent last year), the RBI says.
Read more of this in a report by George Mathew published in The Indian Express... (Link given below)
