The Rajasthan government has launched a wallet app under its Bhamashah program, Inc42 reports. This has been launched in partnership with Yes Bank. The government’s Bhamashah scheme is aimed at “financial inclusion, women empowerment and effective service delivery,” according to a brochure (pdf) for the program. Each family under the program is issued a ‘Bhamashah card’ which is linked to a resident’s bank account via their Aadhaar number. The scheme is designed to manage everything from public distribution system (PDS) rations to direct benefit transfer (DBT) payments from the government to citizens’ bank accounts.

Enrolling on Bhamashah

To enroll on Bhamashah, the Rajasthan government provides an Aadhaar-based method where it auto-populates the fields based on “data already available with the State”. This probably relies on Rajasthan’s State Resident Data Hub provided to it by the UIDAI. But that database, along with all the others, is said to have been destroyed before the Aadhaar Act was passed. As such, it is unclear how this form of registration would work without Rajasthan’s government somehow retaining a copy of the data. Note that the app seems to be available only to Rajasthan residents, as it asks for a DBT and Aadhaar number.

Bill payments and wallet-to-bank

Like other wallet services, the Bhamashah wallet allows users to transfer money between bank accounts and their wallets. Most commercially popular wallet apps already allow this. The app also supports QR payments, but only to recipients that have the wallet installed. It’s unclear if the app supports UPI. Per Inc42, 5.61 crore registrations have happened on the Bhamashah program (not the wallet) overall, and 37.5 crore direct benefit transactions have happened, where Rs 14,000 crore has been deposited into beneficiaries’ accounts.

Also read:
– Telangana now has an official wallet and it is setting itself up to fail
– Mobile wallet transactions declined by 15.8M to 309.6M in June 2018

Edit: We’ve updated the first paragraph to reflect the partnership with Yes Bank, and added Telangana’s wallet story in recommended reads.