Published
Dec 16, 2016
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India’s cash shortage to end by mid Jan: Kant

Published
Dec 16, 2016

India’s cash crunch will end by mid January according to the Amitabh Kant CEO of the country’s premier think tank, NITI Aayog.


Reserve Bank of India

Disruption in the economy was inevitable after this step, taken as India aspires to have become a USD 10 trillion economy, said Kant in a statement by industry body FICCI.

Kant also heads the high-level committee set up by the government to identify all possible modes of digital payments across sectors as it pushes on with its drive towards a cashless economy.

"The committee is well on its way towards establishing and monitoring an implementation framework with strict timelines to ensure that nearly 80 per cent of the transactions in India move to the digital-only platform," Kant said.

According to the statement, he emphasised that for sustaining a 7.5 per cent growth, digitisation is important as India cannot afford to have a parallel economy generated by high level of cash transactions.

India is the only economy in the world with 1 billion biometric authentications and 1 billion mobile phones, Kant said, adding that it has the digitisation infrastructure to leverage the JAM trinity -- Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile.

Noting that Aadhaar-enabled payments were the biggest disruption in India, he said nearly 30 crore people who are without mobile connections can use Aadhaar and thumb impression or Iris connection for digital payments.

In the next 6-7 months every smart phone user would be able to make Aadhaar based payment using a device based on inter-operating system, Kant said, pointed out that as India moves towards digitisation transaction costs would come down.

Highlighting various incentive schemes taken by the government to promote digital payments such as 'Lucky Grahak Yojana' and 'Digi Dhan Vyapari Yojna', the NITI Aayog CEO assured merchant-traders that in their move towards digitisation there would be no harassment by tax official by way of scrutiny of the previous years of books of accounts.

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