 "Central ministries, depts draw plans to go cashless after Modi's directive")
The directives were issued by Prime Minister Modi last night in a special cabinet meeting held to review the demonetisation drive. The steps to go cashless would be reviewed in a follow-up cabinet meeting likely to held next week.
On its part, the labour ministry, along with finance ministry, has decided to hold special camps in specific locations in all the over 640 districts in the country starting Saturday, to facilitate opening of bank accounts for labourers in the organised and unorganised sectors.
Communications have been sent to all state governments for cooperation to hold such camps, while a team consisting of district magistrates, lead district manager of the bank and labour officer would decide on modalities of holding such camps .
A senior Finance Ministry source said making the of use debit cards and e-wallets compulsory across the board is legally untenable, but banks have been asked to insist their account holders use these instruments. On Thursday, the Finance Minister held a video-conference with senior bank officials.
Officials bemoaned that politicians, the judiciary and the media were unaware of the extent to which plastic money has penetrated, and claimed that its use is growing not just in urban areas, but also in semi-urban and rural areas for ATM withdrawals.
Quoting Reserve Bank of India data, a source claimed there are nearly 720 million ATM cards in the country. He claimed that of these, as many as 450 million debit cards are used routinely, or intermittently, for cash withdrawals from ATMs.
More From This Section
In food and agriculture ministries, meetings were held to chalk out a strategy to go cashless. Food Minister Ramvilas Paswan directed his officials to achieve 100 per cent cashless working within the next 15 days.
All payments made for purchasing foodgrains by Food Corporation of India (FCI) and others would have to mandatorily done through RTGS or cheques, while advisories have been issued to states to install card readers alongside point-of-sale (PoS) devices. At present, these devices have been installed at about a fifth of the 500,000-plus ration shops across the country.
For FCI labour payments too, the Centre has directed that all payments made henceforth should in bank accounts.
"The Prime Minister is very serious on the issue of going cashless. Our officials have been told to go comply as far as possible," Paswan told PTI after the meeting.
Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh also held a meeting with officials from fertiliser companies to see if fertiliser sales could be done entirely on the online payment systems.
The government also constituted a high-powered committee under NITI Aayog CEO, Amitabh Kant, to look into digital payments for all government-citizen transactions.
The Aayog, in a presentation made to government some time back, had in fact pitched for promoting e-payments in a big way.
The route it suggested included direct integration of e-wallets such as Paytm with UPI, increasing the wallet transaction limits from Rs 10,000 on presentation of additional KYCs, encouraging digital payments for all government services and surcharge on cash handling beyond a certain limit to discourage cash.
The new committee under Kant will identify and operationalise in the earliest possible timeframe user-friendly digital payment options in all sectors of the economy, an official statement said.
Prime Minister Modi, meanwhile, at a public rally in Punjab on Friday, appealed to the people to let their mobile phones serve as a bank branch to deal with corruption and black money.
"You can download mobile applications provided by banks on your phones and I want to urge political leaders, teachers, youth to train people on mobile banking," he said.