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A high-level committee has been set up to facilitate creation of necessary infrastructure for implementation of cashless economy. This follows a directive from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy and Mines, to work on measures that would reduce the impact of demonetisation, particularly in rural India.
The purpose of the committee is to expedite ‘National strategy to transfer India into a cashless economy’ and the committee includes Secretary,MeitY, Disinvestment Secretary and Chief Executive of NITI Aayog. According to the strategy, the members are asked to see how to create necessary infrastructure across the country and who all (which departments) can be involved in the programme. “As a preparatory measure, the IT Ministry had called a meeting today (Thursday) where Heads of Common Service Centres (CSCs), National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology (NIELIT), Aadhaar, Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) and National Informatics Centre participated,” a government official told BusinessLine.
The PMO had a meeting with Minister of IT and Law & Justice, Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday and in return Prasad has told the committee members to start working on the strategy immediately in a meeting held on Thursday.
In the meeting, everyone gave their version on how their services are well equipped to perform the task of universalising cashless economy in the country and how, the official said.
“For example, Aadhaar Head said if biometrics is used for transactions, things could be done in a quicker way and may reduce the long queues. Similarly, STPI has said it can train the trainers in the rural areas,” the official said.
The official said, Prasad was also of the view that as the number of CSCs (more than two-lakh centres) has grown exponentially over the recent past, they can be used extensively for the transactions as the CSCs have banking licences too.“For rural areas, there are 30,000 village level entrepreneurs in CSCs who are doing banking transactions and 9,000 outlets for NIELIT. So, they hire at least 10 people each under them, they can create additional workforce of manifold,” said another government official.
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