Haryana to integrate online payments with RBI platform

Sushil Manav

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 27

The Haryana Government has decided to integrate its online systems of receipts and payments with e-Kuber, the electronic platform of the Reserve Bank of India.

Senior functionaries of the state Finance Department held a meeting with officials of the RBI and the National Informatics Centre (NIC) over the issue and the final integration of the state government’s e-Billing and e-Gras systems with the e-Kuber platform would be made once the technical issues are sorted out.

Nirmal Chand, Regional Director, RBI, Chandigarh, CG Rajinikanthan, Director-cum-Special Secretary, Finance Department, and IT team of the RBI from Mumbai attended the meeting.

“All government receipts and payments are to be monitored by the RBI. The idea behind integration is that database will be readily available to the RBI after this,” Rajinikanthan told The Tribune. He said all payments made by the state government, including salary and other bills of the employees, were electronically done on e-Billing platform.

Similarly, all receipts, including treasury challans, stamp duty; taxes etc were received through another platform, e-Gras.

“We have decided to integrate e-Payment and e-Gras of the Haryana Government with e-Kuber of the RBI,” Rajinikanthan said. Nearly 12 states have already done this exercise. Rajinikanthan said that Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra were the first to have integrated their electronic payment and receipt systems with the RBI’s platform.

OP Bishnoi, Additional Director, Finance Department, said the department would be able to integrate e-Gras almost immediately as no modifications were required for that. However, the e-Payment was likely to take some time since modifications were required to integrate it with e-Kuber, he said.

Meanwhile, the department has also begun the process of making its accounting paperless at the headquarters by transfer of images of vouchers, pay bills etc electronically rather than in paper form.

“Nearly a truckload of vouchers and pay bills from each of the 21 districts come to the headquarters every year, which are not to be seen here as the data is also available electronically. These are required in paper form for proof at the time of litigation, if any. It is planned that the papers will not be shifted to the headquarters and only their images will be transferred electronically,” said Rajinikanthan.