RBI extends PIDF scheme by 2 years

Reserve Bank of India(RBI) has extended the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund(PIDF) Scheme by a further two years to December 31, 2025.

Here, RBI has on Friday, issued a revised PIDF scheme in a bid to widen the scope of beneficiaries and acceptance infrastructure.

Additionally, subsidy for northeastern states and union territories of Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh is uniform at 90% of the cost of the device, regardless of the type of device.

These measures will help accelerate the deployment of payment acceptance infrastructure in targeted geographies.

RBI announced these measures in its statement on developmental and regulatory policies in October.

In January 2021, RBI operationalized the PIDF scheme for three years, to incentivise the deployment of payment acceptance infrastructure such as physical point of sale, quick response (QR) codes in tier-3 to tier-6 centres, northeastern states and Union Territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh.

Beneficiaries of the street vendor-focussed PM SVANidhi Scheme in tier-1 and tier-2 centres were later included in August 2021.The corpus of PIDF stands at Rs 1026.4 crore as of November 30.

The number of physical devices stood at 827,901, and digital devices stood at 27.2 million.