Our Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing backlash from the opposition be it the Opposition Political Party or the common man after he eliminated India’s highest denomination currency. And to simplify the matter PM NaMo has reportedly roped in a tech tycoon from the ranks of his adversaries to help in cleaning the cash.
Nadan Nilekani is a high profile member of the Opposition Party of BJP that is of Indian National Congress Party . Now he has joined hands with the present government to map a path to world of digital payments. As PM NaMo said that India is trying to ends it reliance on the hard currency and is all geared to go cashless.
And this is not the 1st time when the Former Head of technology giant Infosys has tackled projects at the national level , he had also spearheaded the India’s biometric based Aadhaar unique identification program.
PM NaMo had designed the plan in a way to eliminate corruption by outlawing the existing Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes on November 8 , which had seemingly wiped out over 4/5ths of nation’s currency and had caused grievous pain for the millionns , right from the street hawkers in the south to the diamond cutters in the west.
As we all can sense that NaMo’s Plan A did not work well enough , so the government is trying its backup Plan B to salvage the current chaos with the help of Credit Suisse Group AG and Deutsche Bank AG which will estimate the expansion and try to slow it down to at least 1% point in the year through March.
Nandan Nilekani has joined the government to work in cleaning cash.
Nandan Nilekani and his 13 person committee are now meeting to work out plans on how to get more number of Indians to adopt the digital payments methods. The nation has already rolled out is ‘United Payments Interface’ but with hundreds of millions not having access to smart phones or Internet , so this plan seems quite prolonged approach and could not slow the down the dependence on the hard cash.
Seeing this situation many digital wallet start-ups like Paytm , Freecharge and MobiKwik have pushed their digital wallets limit and are focusing on 2 main avenues , first is to get more number of merchants to accept the ‘United Payments Interface’ and the other is to procure large amount of point of sale devices.
With this the Google and Boston Consulting Group Projects in India working for digital payments will grow up to $500 Billion and will cover the half of the India’s population in 2020.
On this Nandan Nilekani says “every section of society have to be worked on different strategy , first thing to be done is to simplify the problem and then work on it. It is a big target but the support from the Government is helping out every time!”
Now talking about the real challenge which is around 350 Million people does not own a mobile phone and many of them are economically challenged . Now the plan is to draw those who are enrolled in Aadhaar and then enlist the remaining others to adopt the microATMs which are promoted by the big Indian banks like IDFC and start-ups like Novopay etc.
Nilekani signs off by saying “there is a sense of urgency for the things to be planned out immediately. We are trying to develop all the strategies at the same time to achieve universal coverage.”
