E-payment reward: 10 lakh users get Rs 153.5 crore

NEW DELHI: The government has given over Rs 153.5 crore reward money to nearly 10 lakh citizens under its scheme to incentivise digital payments and make India a less cash economy, NITI Aayog head Amitabh Kant said on Tuesday.

The winners include over 9.2 lakh consumers and 56,000 merchants, Kant said, citing the figures by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which has been executing the schemes — launched on December 25 last year in the aftermath of the government’s November 8 demonetisation move.

The scrapping of the large currency notes of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes created an unprecedented crash crunch with people across the country queuing up outside banks and ATMs to withdraw their own money.

The government then encouraged people to go for digital transactions and launched the Lucky GrahakYojna (LGY) for consumers and Digi-DhanVyaparYojna (DVY) for merchants to incentivise them and promote digital payments.

The schemes will remain open until April 14. There are 15,000 daily winners qualifying for total prize money of Rs 1.5 crore, as per the schemes. In additional to this there are over 14,000 weekly winners qualifying for total prize money of over Rs 8.3 crore every week.

Customers and merchants who use RuPay Card, BHIM/UPI, USSD based *99# service and Aadhaar Enabled Payment Service are eligible for wining daily and weekly lucky draw prizes.