With the country undergoing state-wide lockdowns for the second year in a row due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, one can expect that a larger chunk of the population will increasingly use digital payments platforms and small-medium businesses will turn to similar modes of payment for their daily operations. While the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has grown by 92% in terms of the value of transactions to Rs 41 lakh crore in 2020-21, compared to the previous year, the value of retail payments transactions grew by 7% to Rs 41 lakh crore in 2020-21, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in its annual report. Overall, however, the value of digital payment transactions decreased by 12% to Rs 1,410 lakh crore in 2020-2021 compared to the same period of the previous year. The payment systems recorded a robust growth of 26.2 % in terms of volume during 2020-21 on top of the expansion of 44.2% in the previous year. In terms of value, the contractionary trend which started in the previousyear (-1.2%) got further amplified and witnessed a drop of 13.4%, mainly due to lower growth observed in the large value payment system, viz., Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system and decrease in transactions of paper-based instruments — RBI Annual Report The RBI said that the decline in the value of RTGS transactions, a payments channel operated by the RBI for large value transactions, is largely attributable to subdued economic activity. The other reason for the drop in…
