Telangana govt to encourage citizens to adopt less-cash lifestyle

Hyderabad: Before making transactions cashless, the state government has decided to encourage citizens to adopt a less-cash lifestyle. Right now, only about three per cent of transactions take place in the digital mode.

The government issued a nine-page note at Wednesday’s collectors conference in which it noted that the currency shortage would continue for some time and there was an urgent need to encourage citizens to adopt ‘less-cash’ mode of transactions.

The total number of saving bank accounts in the state was 3.89 crore and about 1.95 crore debit cards were issued. Among them, 1.28 crore cards are inactive.
Under the PM’s Jan Dhan Yojana, 83.37 lakh bank accounts and 23.31 lakh zero balance accounts were opened. About 69.43 lakh Rupay cards were issued and 62.17 lakh accounts were seeded with Aadhaar cards.

Still 6.32 lakh Rupay cards have not been distributed. Even for the cards issued, Personal Identification Number numbers were not issu-ed for 6.28 lakh cards.
The state government has directed collectors to obtain village-wise data from the banks for undistributed PIN and ensure that the numbers are distributed.

As of December 7, about 56 lakh Rupay cards were inactive across the state. The government asked the collectors to encourage prepaid card system, a bank account for payment of wages by firms, build-ers, traders, industries and others who employee more than 5 persons per day on an average.

The government has also told collectors to ensure that all government departments and agencies move towards cashless mode within a timeframe for both payments and receipts.

As on December 7, there were 50,951 point-of-sale swipe machines in the state. The government told collectors that since mobile PoS works with a smartphone, they should encourage traders with smartphones to adopt them.