The government of India is looking into making it mandatory for all shops “above a certain threshold” to offer Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments through QR codes, and give customers and shopkeepers GST benefits for using UPI, the Economic Times reports. The GST Council had given the proposal a go-ahead just before the elections and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), bank-owned private organisation which runs UPI, is now working to implement it once the elections after over, the report said. The plan seeks to bring about behavioural change by introducing the UPI payments for B2C transactions, a source told the newspaper, and that QR codes may also be introduced on invoices in the medium-to-long-term. 'Virtual monopoly' for NPCI? While the move could indeed increase the adoption of digital payments, it would also give NPCI a monopoly as it owns India’s only two inter-operable QR code systems - one that is solely for UPI transactions and the other, BharatQR, for payments through cards as well as UPI. “This would amount to a virtual monopoly for NPCI as companies such as Paytm with their own closed QR code systems would be locked out,” payments expert Shashidhar KJ told MediaNama. In addition, as Twitter user Srikanth Lakshmanan pointed out, the GST benefits for businesses and consumers would be restricted to those using the NPCI's BHIM app for UPI payments or its RuPay card. He also criticised the centralisation of user data for private profit (NPCI is a private firm) and said the exercise…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...