Andhra CM panel meets top bankers

NEW DELHI: The first meeting of the sub-committee on demonetisation and its related issues headed by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu met in Mumbai today, where the members of the panel interacted with senior RBI officials and top bankers of the country with an aim to address the issues concerning the supply side of digital transactions.

Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu (C), Vice-Chairman of Niti Aayog Arvind Panagariya (L) and NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant at a press conference in New Delhi on Thursday.

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, December 8

The first meeting of the sub-committee on demonetisation and its related issues headed by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu met in Mumbai today, where the members of the panel interacted with senior RBI officials and top bankers of the country with an aim to address the issues concerning the supply side of digital transactions.

Naidu along with other members of the panel NITI Aayog vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya flew down to Delhi to address the media about the deliberations that took place at the RBI headquarters in Mumbai.

Naidu said, “We had a very fruitful discussion today with top bankers, as to how best and early we could achieve interoperability of bank transactions. The aim is to quickly shift to less-cash economy, as now there is no option but to go digital in our monetary transactions.”

He, however, agreed to the fact that there existed a host of problems in completely shifting to digital transactions, but for that “we are trying to address them by studying and adopting the best practices available world over”.

“Our first target is to grab low-hanging fruits such as Aadhaar platform and high penetration of Android phones in the country. With these two every mobile can turn into a wallet,” he said, adding that banks have assured that they will push POS machines in a big way and the government would provide all assistance.

Naidu also contended that once the system is rolled out to a reasonable level, market forces would take over. He said the panel will meet on a day-to-day basis from now on and in a week’s time “We are expecting to submit our report to the government”.

New payment mode for feature mobiles soon

New Delhi: Amid cash crunch due to demonetisation, a more user-friendly and simple version of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) used on feature mobile phones for making cashless payments will be rolled out in next 15 days.

“NCPI is already working to make USSD (*99#) very simple, convenient, robust and to link it with UPI. So in another 15-20 days, we will have a very new version of USSD with many strong and robust easy to handle features,” NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant told reporters.

At present there are about 400 million feature mobile handset users in the country. The move will push the digital transaction in a big way particularly in rural areas where penetration of smart phone and Internet is skewed. — PTI