Telangana, Gujarat, Kerala lead the pack of states

In the two-month window after demonetisation— between Nov 9 and Jan 9— apart from commercial tax services, Gujarat and Kerala registered most transactions in various public distribution schemes

E- TRANSACTIONS POST DEMONETISATION

TWO MONTHS since the Centre announced its decision to withdraw high-denomination currency notes, Telangana, Kerala, and Gujarat top the list of states that have recorded the maximum number of electronic transactions per 1,000 people — including both financial and non-financial transactions clocked between November 9 and January 9 on various services offered by state governments.

According to data sourced from the Electronic Transaction Aggregation & Analysis Layer, or etaal platform, Telangana led with 2,848.96 transactions per 1,000 people, which is over five times the national average of 527.82 transactions. This was calculated on the basis of individual data of the 29 states available on the Information and Technology Ministry platform.

This was followed by Kerala, which had 2,157.8 transactions per 1,000 people, and Gujarat at 1,431.92 transactions. In fact, the total number of transactions per 1,000 people in these top three states was more than the total of the remaining states in the top 10 list. According to number of transactions for every 1,000 people during the calendar year 2016, while Telangana and Kerala were the top two states as well, Gujarat was replaced by Andhra Pradesh.

In the list of total transactions, too, Telangana led by clocking over 10.02 crore etransactions in across 128 services provided for state government projects during the two-month period ending January 9. In this list, Gujarat was second with 8.64 crore etransactions being made across 162 services. States such as Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal with high population were also present in this list, indicating that the larger transaction base was on account of their broader population base. As per number of e-transactions per 1,000 people, instead of these two states, relatively smaller states such as Himachal Pradesh and Meghalaya made the cut to top ten list.

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology had launched the etaal platform in 2014 for providing a realtime aggregated view of e-services being delivered across different states and levels of the government. These transactions are not limited to digital payments and other financial transactions conducted across government services such as utility bill payments, tax payments, traffic challan payments