Sankalakariya, a village in Karnataka’s Udupi district, has about 250 women who earn their livelihood from making beedis, and are paid once a week by the wholesaler.
In order to curb the usage of cash and encourage digital savings, the wholesaler has opened an Airtel Payments Bank account for all of them.
Now these women get their weekly salaries through Airtel Payments Bank, offering them control on their finances, according to an internal note on the importance of payments banks seen by
Similarly, at Kanukunta village in Medak district of Telangana, every household has at least one savings account and shopkeepers are now equipped to accept digital payments, while people in Padra Tehsil of Vadodara district in Gujarat and Chauhan Khedi village in Indore district of Madhya Pradesh are also warming up to digital banking.
Airtel Payments Bank, the first company to receive a payments bank licence from the RBI on April 11, 2016, is also the first off the block to launch the services, aimed at bringing the un-banked into the banking fold.
The company’s payments bank initiative is aimed mainly as a rural foray, and it has already brought about 1,000 villages under the digital initiative.
In these 1,000 villages, about two-thirds of the households have at least one savings bank account, while every village now has at least one banking point that enables citizens to access banking services (cash deposits, withdrawals and money transfers).
All the shops in these villages also accept digital payments, while farmers and small artisans in these villages have already been trained to accept digital payments, the note said.
Most of the households, who have one or more family members working in cities or towns, can bank or transact with a basic feature phone. The company is targeting to extend these to 5,000 villages.
Banking pointsThe payments bank also uses the more than 2.5 lakh Airtel retail stores that doubles up as banking points, much more than the total 2.25 lakh ATMs in the country. It also aims to scale its network to six lakh banking points across the country.
The company also intends to on-board more than five million merchants from rural India. Nearly one million are already on its network. The firm, a part of Bharti Enterprises that owns the country’s largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel, had committed an investment of ₹3,000 crore for its national operations.
When contacted a Bharti Airtel spokesperson declined to comment.