Chandrababu Naidu meets RBI brass; member CMs of panel skip maiden meeting

MUMBAI: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, head of CMs' panel on demonetisation, today met the Reserve Bank brass and top bankers here to review the ground-level situation following the scrapping of high value notes, even as other chief ministers skipped the meeting.

Apart from Naidu, the members of the committee include Odisha's Naveen Patnaik, Madhya Pradesh's Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Sikkim's Pawan Kumar Chamling, Puducherry's V Narayanasamy (Congress), Maharashtra's Devendra Fadnavis along with NITI Aayog vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya, and its chief executive Amitabh Kant.

When asked, an official from Naidu's office told PTI in Amaravati that the member CMs were informed of the meeting and not invited.

The 13-member panel was formed last month-end to outline measures to promote digital payment systems to promote transparency, financial inclusion and also prepare a roadmap for the same.

Nandan Nilekani, former chairman of UIDAI, Janmejaya Sinha of BCG, Rajesh Jain of netCore, Sharad Sharma of iSpirit and Jayant Varma, professor of finance at IIM-Ahmedabad are special invitees in the committee.

As part of the meeting, Naidu, apart from the RBI brass, met bankers like SBI chair Arundhati Bhattacharya, ICICI Bank's Chanda Kochhar, Aditya Puri of HDFC Bank, Axis Bank's Shikha Sharma, and PS Jayakumar of Bank of Baroda and also National Payments Corporation chief AP Hota.

Coming out of the meeting, Axis Bank's Sharma told waiting reporters that the panel discussed how to widen the use of the existing infrastructure such as Aadhaar-enabled systems, unified payment interface (UPI), points of sale (PoS) and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), to improve digitisation, apart from building additional infra for a cashless economy at the states level.

None of the other bankers spoke to the reporters.