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In the kharif season starting June, farmers in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, among others States, can make cashless purchases of fertilisers through the BHIM-Aadhaar Pay digital payments platform launched in Nagpur on Friday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
About 10,000 fertiliser shops across Gujarat and other States, including Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, will be equipped by June with Point of Sale (POS) machines, which will have an Aadhaar interface. This will enable farmers to transact using their Aadhaar number and biometric authentication to make purchases for fertilisers.
“This is a revolutionary measure and we look forward to implementing it in all the States where we supply fertilisers,” GNFC managing director Rajiv Kumar Gupta told BusinessLine.
“About 50 per cent of our fertilisers are supplied in Gujarat; we will have the platform implemented in the other States too,” he added.
In December 2016, GNFC had first launched its digital payments initiative for fertiliser sales by introducing an online portal, a mobile app and by encouraging farmers to use credit or debit cards at the GNFC fertiliser retail outlets. In about a month, the company had sold fertilisers to almost two lakh farmers for the summer sowing.
The Aadhaar-based payments through the Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) app is set to revolutionse digital payments in India, mainly in rural areas, where customers will be able to make purchases using their Aadhaar number linked with their bank account.
BHIM was launched after demonetisation in November last year as a payment app for peer-to-peer financial transactions. However, the new platform, Aadhaar Pay, is developed for merchants to receive payments from customers digitally over the counter using Aadhaar’s biometric authentication. The government has named the new payments system BHIM-Aadhaar.
“We will popularise BHIM-Aadhaar Pay among farmers. This is in line with the government’s policy to carry out all fertiliser transactions through POS machines,” said Gupta.
About 5,000 students from colleges and other professional courses have been roped in to engage with farmers under the referral scheme for the BHIM-Aadhaar Pay app, which give incentives to spread its use.
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