The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) recently announced a two-year extension to the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) Scheme, stretching it until December 2025. This extension comes with an expanded coverage, now encompassing sound box instruments and Aadhaar-enabled biometric devices to avail of subsidies. As of November 30, 2023, the PIDF holds a corpus of Rs 1,026.37 crore.
Initially launched in January 2021 for a three-year duration, the PIDF scheme's primary goal was to promote the installation of payment acceptance infrastructure. This included physical Point of Sale (PoS) terminals and Quick Response (QR) codes, specifically targeting tier-3 to tier-6 centers, along with the North Eastern states and the Union Territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh.
In an official statement, the central bank declared the extension of the PIDF scheme for an additional two years, stretching until December 31, 2025. To broaden the scheme's reach, merchants eligible under the PM Vishwakarma Scheme across all centers have been incorporated as beneficiaries under the PIDF scheme.
To further encourage the acceptance infrastructure, sound box devices and Aadhaar-enabled biometric devices are now eligible for subsidy claims within the PIDF scheme.
Moreover, the RBI noted that subsidies for special focus regions, such as the North Eastern states and UTs of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, have been standardized at 90 percent of the device's cost.
As of November 2023, the count of payment acceptance devices deployed under the PIDF scheme included 827,901 physical devices (such as PoS, mPoS, GPRS, and PSTN) and 271,95,902 digital devices, covering inter-operable QR code-based payments like UPI QR and Bharat QR.
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