New Delhi : Your Aadhaar number will soon be enough to pay to merchants using a mobile application the government promised to release by Wednesday to facilitate digital payments. No need to have a debit or credit card for such payments.
Biometric devices are in the market for the merchants to connect to smart phones and convert into a Point of Sale (PoS) machine that works like the swipe machine used in shops for accepting payments by cards.
Information Technology and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters here that 40 crore bank accounts are already linked to Aadhaar while the Finance Ministry is pursuing the banks to connect rest of the accounts also with Aadhaar numbers through the KYC (Know Your Customer) policy.
He said this will facilitate the Aadhaar-enabled payment system (AEPS) for cashless and cardless money transactions. He said the government was also rolling out a nationwide programme to train over 1 crore people in e-payments.
Elaborating the minister’’s announcement, the CEO of the government-run CSC e-Governance India Limited, a special purpose vehicle (SPV), Dinesh Tyagi said: “We are developing a UPI-enabled mobile application. It will be available in two-four days. The customer feeds Aadhaar number, scans finger on the biometric, approves the amount to be paid on the application and the payment is transferred from his/her account to the merchant’s account.”
Unified Payment Interface, or UPI, allows you to pay directly from your bank account to different merchants without the hassle of typing your card details, or netbanking/wallet password.
