What Is Aadhaar Payment App?
Currently, whenever a user makes an online transaction or a merchant receives any payment, a convenience fee is charged. The additional fees restrict a lot of people to move towards digital payments. Through this Aadhaar Payment App, the additional fees will be waived off, making it more convenient for the merchants to go cashless.
What Is It Aimed For?
The aim of Aadhaar Payment App is simple, to improve the digital payment system and to offer hassle free and secure payment platform to the people of India. It is the next step towards promoting cashless transactions in India.
How It Will Work?
There will be two apps, one for consumers and the other for the merchants. The consumers can use the app just like any mobile wallet. The merchant app requires two things to work, one a fingerprint scanner and the other is an Android smartphone. The app will use the fingerprint marks taken by the government at the time of preparing Aadhar Card to eliminate the problem of remembering the passwords. The bio-metric scanners will authenticate a user to enable the transaction. The other highlight of this app is that the user would not even require a mobile app all the time just like other digital payments platforms which include Paytm, Mobikwik, Jio Wallet, and Freecharge. A customer needs to feed the information of the bank from which the payment will be initiated and Aadhaar number into the app and after that with just bio-metric scan, the transaction will be authenticated. The app will allow users to make payments without any phone even. According to statistics, 40 crore Aadhaar numbers have been already linked to bank accounts and the more than half of the population still needs to go through this process to make India, a cashless economy.
How It Will Be Promoted?
To make this App a success, the IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the government will be conducting various workshops to train 14 lakh Village Level Entrepreneur (VLE) across 500 districts and 6500 blocks. The workshop will be also attended by Members of Parliament. According to the program, each VLE will train 40 individuals covering 80 lakh individuals and at least 10 shopkeepers and further to 25 merchants across the country. A two-day event at Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium in Delhi will be also conducted to create awareness about this new digital transaction platform.
Our Take
Since the news of demonetization, the country has witnessed a series of changes and has faced trouble in making day to day payments. Though the urban audience has the legitimacy of various sources of payments, the rural India still depend a lot on cash flow. With a lack of bank accounts, poor internet connectivity and low literacy rate of people are some of the major challenges that government has to solve at a rapid pace to make digital payments a real success. Let’s see how the new app will change the way people execute their different transactions and payment requirements.
