Budget 2021: Rs 1,500-crore e-payments push to ease zero MDR woes

NEW DELHI: The announcement by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman of a Rs 1,500-crore fund to hasten the expansion of India’s digital payments industry is being viewed as reparation for the waiver of merchant discount rates on UPI and RuPay in her previous budget.

The payments industry, which is waiting for the fine print on deployment of the earmarked funds, expects there will be a target-based subsidy for firms deploying acceptance infrastructure in tier-3 towns and beyond.

“Hopefully, this (budgetary fund) will be used to reimburse losses suffered by payment service providers for processing RuPay debit cards and UPI transactions for free in the year 2020,” said Vishwas Patel, who is the chairman of Payments Council of India (PCI).