The National Payments Corporation of India has signed an agreement with the state government of Telangana to offer UPI, and RuPay debit and credit cards as payment options for users of the MeeSeva website, which offers various government services. NPCI, which runs the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and RuPay, is also in the process of enabling a Quick Response (QR) code-enabled payment mechanism as an additional feature on the MeeSeva portal, which will be available both online and offline. MeeSeva, a government of Telangana initiative, offers government-to-citizen and government-to-business services through its website. According to the website, MeeSeva offers 368 services across various departments including agriculture, Aadhaar, eKYC, healthcare, education, rural development, and social welfare. In a press release, MeeSeva claimed to have crossed 100 million transactions last year. How widely used are UPI and RuPay cards? The number of transactions conducted over UPI has soared since it was introduced in 2016. The total number of transactions in May (733.5 million) was around 3.87 times higher than in the same month last year, while the amount transacted (Rs 152,449 crore) was 4.6 times higher. Though there was a 6% drop in the number of transactions between April 2019 and May 2019, the amount transacted went up by 7% over that period. NPCI data also showed that RuPay Cards recorded 61.01 million transactions at PoS terminals and 50.89 million transactions in e-commerce in May. Recent initiatives by NPCI NPCI will now onboard small merchants as individuals and not businesses to make the process easier. Earlier this month it said…
