Govt payment portal: student’s difficulty, officer’s resolve

In 1978, civil services aspirant Jawahar Thakur from Purnia district of Bihar spent a whole day looking for a postal order worth ₹25 to pay his UPSC exam fee.

Although there was a post office in his village, it had postal orders only for ₹1 and ₹2. Had he bought those, he would have had to devote an entire page in his application for details about the payment. Finally, Thakur managed to get the postal order from a nearby town.

That day Thakur decided that, if he ever got the opportunity, he would introduce a centralised payment mechanism for various government services.

Thakur cleared the UPSC exam, got into the Indian Civil Accounts Service, and is currently the Controller General of Accounts.

Thakur encouraged his officials to develop a new e-payment portal for government services, which is to be launched by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in December as a pilot.

“I come from a village and know that paying for services there takes a lot of time and effort. The new portal is expected to remove these difficulties,” he says.

Initially, State Bank of India will partner the project, and other public sector banks will join later. Based on the pilot, the plan is to make the portal available nation-wide from April 1.

Through it, one can pay for government services such as passport and examinations conducted by government organisations with a debit card, credit card or via net banking.

“Initially, we plan to include two major Ministries and two small Ministries,” Thakur says, without getting into specifics.

There will be two options for paying. If you make the payment before visiting the site of a specific service, an acknowledgement number will be generated, which can be mentioned in the application form.

In the second option, when you apply for a government service and reach the payment box, you will be directed to the new e-payment portal. Currently, various service portals have their own payment gateway.

Fees for government services are accounted under non-tax revenue, which is about ₹4 lakh crore. “Delay in remittances affect accounting of up to ₹50,000 crore. Sometimes, cheques or demand drafts are deposited late by departments, making these ineligible for clearance,” Thakur says.

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