The number of payment acceptance devices, including physical and digital, deployed under the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) Scheme as on December 31, 2022, stood at about 1.87 crore, as per RBI’s latest status update.
The number of physical devices (PoS, mPoS (mobile PoS), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), etc) and digital devices (inter-operable QR code-based payments such as UPI QR, Bharat QR, etc.) stood at 4,85,415 (2,45,942 as at September-end 2021) and 1,82,88,974 (55,36,678), respectively.
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The PIDF Scheme, operationalised by the Reserve Bank from January 1, 2021, subsidises the deployment of Points of Sale (PoS) infrastructure (physical and digital modes) in tier-3 to tier-6 centres and northeastern states of the country.
From August 26, 2021, beneficiaries of PM Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi Scheme) in Tier-1 and Tier-2 centres are also covered. Further, J & K and Ladakh regions are included as special focus areas from June 9, 2022.
The PIDF corpus stood at ₹788.20 crore as on December 31, 2022 (₹613.89 crore in November 2021). Contribution to PIDF is made by the Reserve Bank, authorised card networks and card issuing banks.