This is a herculean task and there has been, an honest attempt by the Government. Steps include creating a digital roadmap of the country, making government Services available to citizens digitally.

The digital transaction targets have also been assigned to high citizen touchpoint authorities like banks, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Ministry of Communication, Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Dept. of Post, Ministry of Human Resource and Development amongst others.

While the government is looking at popularizing these, constant effort are needed to be put in to arrive at zero transaction failure rates.

Demonetisation, one of the greatest efforts that the government undertook did not result in substantial increase in digital payments. After a year, cash usage has continually risen in the market. Click here to read what went wrong.

Setting Robust Railroads

Unless one has robust infrastructure for services to roll-on, it can never be made available to citizens across the length and breadth of the country. High-speed internet and communication availability is the basic requirement.

The Government has already laid several thousand kilometers of optical fiber cable across the country and plans to bring high-speed affordable internet to over 150, 000 villages in the country. Another important piece of infrastructure is to provide a digital identity and a linked bank account to every citizen.

This has been initiated as part of the vastly successful Aadhar ID and the Jan-Dhan Yojana. There are now over 30 crore accounts opened under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana and there are approximately 118 crores Indians holding Aadhar Cards.

Payment infrastructure such as Aadhar Pay, IMPS and UPI are also integral and basic requirements when it comes to enabling payment modes.

Ease of Use:

While making services available at cheap or no-cost is the first step towards large-scale adoption,an equally important step is also to make tools available that can enable paying for such services in a simple and secured interface.

With the consumer shifting to the mobile, it is imperative that this trend is leveraged, and payment options are available on the consumer’s smart as well as feature phone.

There are newer payment mechanisms that have come into being now. Payment methods like UPI, BharatQR, AadhaarPay etc.are becoming increasingly popular – not only because they are instant but also because they make the whole experience of payment extremely easy.

The need is to seamlessly integrate these into Government Services. However, care needs to be taken of not pushing all payment methods to the consumer blindly. Depending on the type of use-case, appropriate payment methods should be made available to the consumer, which will foster greater traction.

As an example, for payment of various utilities such as cooking gas, electricity, water etc. BharatQR is being printed on invoices. Consumers can scan and pay, alternatively consumers can also visit any government appointed suvidha kendra and pay using Aadhaar. Similarly, proximity payments make a great use case for implementing payments at parking and toll plazas.

Mandates and Incentives:

In order to get a large section of the population to avail of the infrastructure and start transacting digitally, the Government needs to use a mix of mandates and incentives. For starters, it has mandated the Merchant commission for debit card acceptance.

This is to encourage merchants to accept and promote debit card usage.

On one hand is the mandate and on the other hand it is the incentive. The Government has rolled out promotion schemes for Aadhar based biometric merchant transactions and BHIM Cashback Schemes for merchants. For consumers, the Government had rolled out BHIM-Referral Bonus Scheme which incentivizes an individual when he refers another individual to BHIM. Similarly schemes like exemption of service charge, travel insurance, discounts etc. have also been announced by various ministries.

Jose Thattil is the Co-Founder of Phi Commerce