We missed this earlier. Almost 300 million — 298.6 million to be exact — of India's Jan Dhan Yojana bank account holders have been issued RuPay cards, as of January this year. India has issued 591.5 million RuPay cards in total as of December 2019. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which developed RuPay to compete with global networks such as Visa and Mastercard, is tight-lipped about numbers related to the network. Even in this case, the data was revealed by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in response to a Parliament question raised by BJP's Pratima Bhoumik last month. Sitharaman said the number of active RuPay cards issued keep changing in "real-time" and so did not reveal this figure. The government has also directed public sector banks to issue RuPay cards to customers, in case they do not indicate any specific card preference, she added. NPCI has data on the number of RuPay cards used in states/UTs for a minimum of one inter-bank (off-us) transaction at an ATM or Point of Sale (PoS) in 2019. In total, 229.02 million RuPay cards were used for doing such transactions at ATMs, while 100.93 million RuPay cards were used for doing such transactions at PoS: ATM transactions (in states): Most: Maharastra, 30.601 million RuPay cards were used for such transactions. Least: Nagaland, 183,999 RuPay cards were used for such transactions. PoS transactions (in states): Most: Maharastra, 14.488 million RuPay cards were used for such transactions. Least: Mizoram, 24,166 RuPay cards were used for such transactions. In Jammu & Kashmir, where internet services…
