The unprecedented cash shortage following the scrapping of old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes will come to an end by mid-January next year, NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said today.
Disruption in the economy was unavoidable after demonetisation as India aspires to become a $10 trillion economy, a statement by industry body FICCI, quoting Kant, read.
He heads the high-level committee set up by the government to identify all possible modes of digital payments across sectors as it pushes on with its drive towards a cashless economy.
"The committee is well on its way towards establishing and monitoring an implementation framework with strict timelines to ensure that nearly 80 per cent of the transactions in India move to the digital-only platform," Kant said.
According to the statement, he emphasised that for sustaining a 7.5 per cent growth, digitisation is important as India cannot afford to have a parallel economy generated by high level of cash transaction.
India is the only economy in the world with 1 billion biometric authentications and 1 billion mobile phones, Kant said, adding that it has the digitisation infrastructure to leverage the JAM trinity — Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile.
Noting that Aadhaar-enabled payments was the biggest disruption in India, he said nearly 30 crore people who are without mobile connections can use Aadhaar and thumb impression or Iris connection for digital payments.
In the next 6-7 months every smartphone user would be able to make Aadhaar based payment using a device based on inter-operating system, Kant said, pointed out that as India moves towards digitisation transaction costs would come down.
Highlighting various incentive schemes taken by the government to promote digital payments such as 'Lucky Grahak Yojana' and 'Digi Dhan Vyapari Yojna', the NITI Aayog CEO assured merchant-traders that in their move towards digitisation there would be no harassment by tax official by way of scrutiny of the previous years of books of accounts.
(With PTI inputs)
