Nabard to give Rs 228 crore grant for cashless payment systems

MUMBAI: In order to encourage cashless payment modes in rural parts of the country, Nabard today said it will provide a grant of Rs 228 crore for deployment of point of sale machines and procurement of EMV based debit cards for farmers.

Nabard Chairman Harsh Kumar Bhanwala said demonetisation has posed a huge challenge to the cash based transactions in rural economy and there is a pressing need to move towards digital transactions.

Nabard will extend nearly Rs 120 crore to banks for deployment of two PoS devices each in one lakh villages of tier 5 and 6 areas having a population of up to 10,000.

For farmers who have RuPay Kisan Cards, Nabard will help in procurement of EMV chip and PIN-based RuPay Kisan Cards by both regional rural banks and the rural co-operative banks.

The approximate expenditure for this will be Rs 108 crore covering around 4.32 crore RuPay Kisan Cards holders.

"We believe that these two initiatives will have a positive impact in easing the transition to digital transactions," Bhanwala said in a statement.

In the past, Nabard has brought the entire co-operative banking system onto core banking solution (CBS) platform.

It had also provided financial support to select regional rural banks for moving over to CBS platform.