India leading globally in digital payments, says Rajeev Chandrasekhar

With the country’s digital payment transactions value through UPI rising to Rs 10.73 lakh crore in August, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said India was leading the world in digital government solutions through direct benefit transfers.

Chandrasekhar said, “India is today leading the world in digital payments in particular and also becoming a pre-eminent country in the use of technology to improve citizens’ lives and Governance – The India stack and other various digital government solutions are now the envy of the world’s nations – India Leads Digital and Digital Leads India thanks to PM Narendra Modi ji’s vision.”

The minister took to Twitter saying the technology was driving the speedy delivery of government benefits to all citizens, replying to a tweet by Christian Odendahl, the European economics editor at The Economist. Odendahl said, “the German state is incapable of transferring money to its citizens because … matching bank and tax IDs takes 18 months, and the admin can only handle 100k transfers a day anyway.”

According to reports, the German government was not able to transfer money to citizens, as merging the tax number with the International Bank Account Number (IBAN) takes 18 months. Thus, the government could process only 100,000 transactions for direct benefit transfers.

“India’s average direct benefit transfers crossed 9 million payments per day in FY 2021-22. Under PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana, up to Rs 19,000 crore transferred directly into bank accounts of 95 million beneficiaries in a single day,” said an official from the Ministry of Electronics and IT, stressing the country’s enhanced digital payment abilities.

“As far as Digital Payments are concerned, over 8,800 crore digital payment transactions took place during 2021-22. In the current financial year, as of July 24, around 3,300 crore digital transactions were made,” the official said.

He added that the “Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) conducted 53 million Aadhaar authentications per day in August 2022. The country also saw a record 7 million income tax returns by July 31, 2022.”

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