The corpus of the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) stands at ₹613.89 crore. Over 2.45 lakh physical devices and more than 55.36 lakh digital devices were deployed for payment acceptance under the PIDF by September-end 2021.

“Contribution to the PIDF is made by the Reserve Bank, authorised card networks and card issuing banks; the corpus currently stands at ₹614 crore,” the Reserve Bank of India said on Tuesday in a status update on the scheme.

RBI’s contribution

Of this amount, while the RBI has contributed ₹ 250 crore, authorised card networks have contributed ₹153.72 crore and card issuing banks have put in ₹210.17 crore.

The PIDF Scheme, operationalised by the RBI from January 1, 2021, subsidises deployment of Points of Sale infrastructure (physical and digital modes) in Tier-3 to Tier-6 centres and north-eastern States of the country.

From August 26 this year, beneficiaries of PM Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi in Tier-1 and Tier-2 centres are also covered.

In terms of deployment of payments acceptance devices, 98,504 physical devices and 20,46,075 digital devices were deployed in Tier 3 and 4 centres. Another 84,968 physical devices and 30,47,750 digital devices were deployed in Tier 5 and 6 centres.

Physical devices include PoS, mobile PoS, GPRS, PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network and digital devices include inter-operable QR code-based payments such as UPI QR, Bharat QR.

In the north-eastern States, 18,449 physical devices and 2,42,145 digital devices were deployed while under the PM SVANidhi Scheme, 44,021 physical devices and 2,00,708 digital devices were deployed.

PIDF will be operational for three years from January 1, 2021 and may be extended for two more years depending upon the progress. It aims to increase payments acceptance infrastructure by adding 30 lakh touch points – 10 lakh physical and 20 lakh digital payment acceptance devices every year.

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