The government is calling it a Christmas gift to the nation. In a bid to encourage the use of digital or electronic payments for personal consumption expenditure, the government will run lucky draws for consumers and merchants every day starting December 25 till Ambedkar’s Jayanthi on April 14, 2017. The cost of these lucky draws is estimated at ₹340 crore.
A lucky consumer can win as much as ₹1 crore and a merchant ₹50 lakh when a mega draw is held on April 14. There are daily and weekly prizes too.
This was announced on Thursday by NITI Aayog Chief Executive Officer Amitabh Kant. The government is launching two schemes for this purpose — the Lucky Grahak Yojana for individuals and the DigiDhan Vyapar Yojana for merchants. The first phase of both schemes will conclude on April 14.
Kant said apart from daily rewards of ₹1,000 each for 15,000 lucky customers for a period of 100 days, there will be weekly prizes of ₹1 lakh, ₹10,000 and ₹5,000 for consumers. For merchants, the weekly prizes would be worth ₹50,000, ₹ 5,000 and ₹2,500.
The mega draw on April 14 would be even bigger: All digital transactions between November 8, the day demonetisation was announced, and April 13, 2017 will be eligible. There will be three mega prizes for consumers worth ₹1 crore, ₹50 lakh and ₹25 lakh and three mega prizes worth ₹50 lakh, ₹25 lakh and ₹12 lakh for merchants.
The winners will be identified through a random draw of the eligible transaction ID automatically generated by a software developed by the National Payments Corporation of India. Payments between ₹50 and ₹3,000 would be eligible.
But there is a catch. Only payments made using government promoted platforms such as RuPay cards, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) and Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) will be eligible for these draws. Payments made using Visa, MasterCard, Maestro and other cards issued by international payments companies will not be. Likewise, payments made through private e-wallets such as PayTM and FreeCharge will also not be eligible. The objective of the exercise is to encourage the poor, the lower middle-class and small businesses to give up cash transactions in favour of virtual cash.