Promoting digital payment options is an integral part of Government’s overall strategy to weed out black money and corruption from public life. NITI Aayog has been tasked to undertake a comprehensive campaign on advocacy, awareness and co-ordinate handholding efforts among general public, micro enterprises and other stakeholders for digital payments. With the goal to ensure that easy and user-friendly methods of digital payments become a mass movement in India, Government also announced a slew of incentives to encourage general public to move from cash to a digital platform. Thus discounts will now be given for payments made on a digital platform at petrol stations, for insurance premium, tolls at national highways and for railway tickets. To reduce transaction costs of digital payments several fees and charges being levied so far by banks and on various government portals have either been reduced or done away with. Scheme has also been launched to improve supply of cards and POS machines in rural areas. Digidhan Melas, where all stakeholders of digital payment ecosystem exhibit and provide actual hand holding to general public in adopting digital payments have also been held to popularise the digital payments amongst the general public.
To give fillip to the digital payment campaign, it was decided to further incentivise people who actively adopt digital platform for making day to day financial transactions. NITI Aayog, along with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) as its implementation partner, launched two major schemes - Lucky Grahak Yojana for consumers and Digi-Dhan Vyapar Yojana for merchants. By providing monetary rewards for undertaking Digital Transactions made with Rupay cards, AEPS, UPI Apps and USSD, these schemes attempt to attract general public and facilitate significant behavioural change among public.
The first draw of the Lucky Grahak Yojana to provide a cashback of Rs.1000 to 15,000 consumers every day for the next 100 days will be launched on December 25th, 2016 at the Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi. Hon’ble Minster of Finance, Shri Arun Jaitley and the Hon’ble Minister of Electronics & Information Technology will inaugurate the first draw of lots in Delhi. To create awareness in different parts of the country while this event would be followed in 100 different cities across India over the next 100 days until March.
Winners will be selected on a daily and weekly basis under the Lucky Grahak Yojana and weekly basis under the Digi-Dhan Vyapar Yojana respectively, leading up to a mega draw on 14th April 2017, where after the scheme shall be reviewed for further implementation.
The draws for these events will be taken out in 100 different cities around the country, in an event at each of these cities, where DigiDhan Mela would also be organised. Presence of various stakeholders of the digital payment ecosystem, like banks, wallets, telecom service providers, other financial service providers, UIDAI at these Digidhan Melas would provide the opportunity to the citizens – both consumers and merchants – to get educated about digital payment options available, the ease of use and also benefit from hand holding provided by the service providers which would encourage wide-scale adoption of digital payments methods. Thus it is expected that large sections of the population would be able to shift from a cash based to a digital platform. In the long term such a mass movement is expected to shift large sections of the consumer and producer sections which was hitherto in the informal sector to the formal fold of the economy.
