Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) Scheme

The RBI has announced creation of Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF). PIDF is intended to subsidize deployment of payment acceptance infrastructure in Tier-3 to Tier-6 centres with special focus on North-Eastern States of the country. It envisages creating 30 lakh new touch points every year for digital payments.

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Objective of Payments Infrastructure Development Fund

The objective of PIDF is to increase the number of acceptance devices multi-fold in the country. The Scheme is expected to benefit the acquiring banks / non-banks and merchants by lowering overall acceptance infrastructure cost.

Advisory Council

An Advisory Council (AC), under the Chairmanship of the Deputy Governor, RBI, has been constituted for managing the PIDF. PIDF will be operational for a period of three years from January 01, 2021 and may be extended for two more years depending upon the progress. PIDF presently has a corpus of ₹ 345 crore (Rs 250 crore contributed by RBI and Rs 95 crore by the major authorised card networks in the country). The Composition of the AC:

Shri B P Kanungo, Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India
Shri Sunil Mehta, Chief Executive, Indian Banks’ Association
Shri D Nageswara Rao, Chief General Manager, DFIBT, NABARD
Shri Dilip Asbe, Chief Executive Officer, National Payments Corporation of India
Shri Vishwas Patel, Chairman, Payments Council of India
Shri Shailesh Paul, Vice President and Head Merchant Sales and Solutions, Visa
Shri Rajeev Kumar, Senior Vice President, Market Development, Mastercard
Shri R Vittal Raj, Chartered Accountant, Kumar & Raj Chartered Accountants
Shri Ajay Michyari, Regional Director, Reserve Bank of India, Mumbai Regional Office (Administrator of PIDF).

Features of Payments Infrastructure Development Fund

The primary focus shall be to create payment acceptance infrastructure in Tier-3 to Tier-6 centres.
North Eastern states of the country shall be given special focus.
While setting parameters for utilisation of funds, the focus shall be to target those merchants who are yet to be terminalised
RBI shall contribute Rs 250 crore to the corpus; the authorised card networks shall contribute in all Rs 100 crore
The card issuing banks shall also contribute to the corpus based on the card issuance volume (covering both debit cards and credit cards) at the rate of Rs 1 and Rs 3 per debit and credit card issued by them, respectively.