Digital transaction volumes up 51 pc in 2018-19 to 3,133.5 cr: Prasad

Digital transaction volumes in India swelled to 3,133.58 crore in 2018-19, registering a growth of 51 per cent over the previous year, and the government does not see any kind of "friction" in digital payments, Parliament was informed Thursday.

The transaction volumes in the first month of the current financial year (till April 30, 2019) alone stood at about 313 crore, Minister for Electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.

To a question on whether the government is aware of the problem of friction in digital payments, the minister said, "no...There is no such friction in digital payments and transactions are increasing year on year".

Government is taking a series of steps to promote digital payments, he said adding the total digital transactions in volume terms stood at 3,133.58 crore during 2018-19, up 51.35 per cent.

However, the percentage increase was lower than that clinched in the previous year, when the total digital transactions were pegged at 2,070.39 crore in 2017-18.

The minister further said that at present, the government has no plans of collaborating with educational or policy institutions to come up with alternate modes of digital payments.

To another question, he said that the volume of digital payment transactions done on the BHIM app has increased from 31.9 lakh in April 2017 to 154.9 lakh in June, 2019.

BHIM or Bharat Interface for Money is a mobile payment app developed by the National Payments Corporation of India based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

"While the volume of transactions on BHIM app has increased during the same period, its share as a per cent of all transactions on BHIM UPI platform has come down due to overall growth in the digital payment transactions, emergence and growth of new payment service providers like Paytm, PhonePe, Google Tez, etc," the minister said.