Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman allocated Rs 1,441 crore towards incentives related to the promotion of RuPay debit cards and low-value BHIM-UPI transactions (person-to-merchant) in the Interim Budget presented on Thursday.
This is significantly lower compared to the government‘s allocation of Rs 2,485 crore towards the scheme in the previous Budget.
In 2023, the Union Cabinet approved a scheme worth Rs 2,600 crore for the promotion of RuPay debit cards and low-value BHIM-UPI (Bharat Interface for Money – Unified Payments Interface) transactions. The scheme is aimed at building a robust digital payment ecosystem and promoting UPI Lite and UPI123PAY as economical and user-friendly digital payment options.
In December last year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) proposed to enhance the limit for UPI payments to hospitals and educational institutions from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh per transaction. Currently, users are required to go through an additional factor of authentication for recurring transactions exceeding Rs 15,000.
In September last year, the National Payments Corporation of India said that monthly UPI transactions crossed the 10-billion mark in August. In October 2019, almost three years after its launch in 2016, UPI surpassed 1 billion monthly transactions for the first time.
Edited by Megha Reddy
