RBI extends payments infrastructure development fund scheme till 2025

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday announced its decision to extend the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) for two years up to December 31, 2025. Earlier, the scheme was launched in 2021 for a period of three years.

As part of the announcement, beneficiaries of the PM Vishwakarma Scheme have been included as merchants under the PIDF scheme. Similarly, soundbox devices and Aadhaar-enabled biometric devices are eligible to claim subsidy as part of the scheme.

Additionally, the subsidy for special focus areas, such as North Eastern states, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh, has been standardised at 90 per cent from 75 per cent of the device cost, irrespective of the device type.

The corpus of PIDF stands at Rs 1,026.37 crore as of November 30, 2023, according to an RBI release.

The PIDF scheme was set up to encourage the deployment of payment acceptance infrastructure such as physical Point of Sale (PoS) terminals, Quick Response (QR) codes, in tier three to tier-six centres, and aforementioned regions.

It aims to increase the number of acceptance devices in the country by adding 30 lakh touchpoints every year.

“The Scheme is expected to benefit the acquiring banks/non-banks and merchants by lowering the overall acceptance infrastructure cost,” according to RBI.

Around 830,000 and 27 million physical and digital devices, respectively, were deployed in the country under the scheme during the same time.

In Special Focus regions such as North Eastern states, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh, around 105,000 and 1.96 million physical and digital devices were deployed as of November 2023.

Physical devices include PoS, mPoS (mobile PoS), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), among others. Similarly, digital devices include inter-operable QR code-based payments such as UPI QR, Bharat QR, among others.