The Chief Ministers’ Committee formed to push digital payments will submit its interim report to the Centre in the next two-three days, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, who is also the Convener of the Committee, said on Thursday.
Stating that the committee is exploring the possibility of the use of technology to simplify the digital payment procedures, Mr. Naidu said that a simpler and more user-friendly version of USSD - Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, or mobile short codes that can be used for banking via low-end feature phones - will be rolled out in next 15 days.
NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said, “National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is working towards making USSD simple and convenient…It will also be linked with UPI. So, in another 15-20 days, we will have a new version of USSD with many strong and robust, easy-to-handle features.”
Mr. Naidu and Mr. Kant, along with Niti Aayog Vice-Chairman Arvind Panagariya and IT Secretary Aruna Sundararajan, on Thursday met the RBI Governor and top officials of all banks.
UPI integration
During the meeting, ways to achieve interoperability among all banks for the unified payments interface were discussed. “There was an issue of interoperability of UPI of various banks in today’s meeting. We are working on interoperability of UPI of different banks,” Mr. Naidu said.
The second meeting of the 13-member Committee is to take place tomorrow.
