Petrol and diesel retailers withheld their agitation till January 13 after banks assured them to defer the decision to charge transaction fee on card payments. In a late night statement, Ajay Bansal, President, All India Petroleum Dealers Federation told reporters that Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had brokered the truce between banks and retailers.

Effectively this means that petrol and diesel retailers will accept credit and debit cards at least till January 13. There will be talks between Oil ministry, finance ministry, banks and retailers to resolve the issue.

Addressing newspersons on the sidelines of a conference in Mangaluru on Sunday, Bansal had said that HDFC Bank and others have informed the petroleum dealers that they will be charged 1 per cent on all credit card transactions and between 0.25 per cent and 1 per cent on debit card transactions from January 9.

He noted that dealers cannot give 1 per cent of their margin to banks, he said. “We have specific mechanisms to compute the margin and these do not have any scope for credit card MDR (merchant discount rate). This will lead to financial loses for the dealers,” he said.

(MDR is the commission charged by the bank that provides the necessary infrastructure to the merchant to accept payments using cards.)

As a result, AIPDA had decided to stop accepting payment through credit and debit cards from January 9 in 53,840 retail outlets across the country, Bansal said. The association had written to the Finance and Petroleum Ministries in this regard, he had said.

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Published on January 9, 2017