India

In the latest move to promote digital payments, the Indian tax authority has announced that from February 2020, retailers with annual sales exceeding Rs 50 million ($700,800) will be fined Rs 5,000 ($70) per day if they fail to provide solutions for the acceptance of digital payments.

India celebrated its 73rd Independence Day on 15 August this year with Prime Minister Narendra Modi encouraging businesses to put up signs welcoming digital payments and shunning cash.

India is seeing a gradual decline in the number of ATMs, despite the increase in cash demand.

Following India’s demonetization, TCPSL statistics indicate that cash demand is growing, whereas ATM availability is still too low to respond to consumer needs.

The Indian payments ordeal is not over as the Reserve Bank of India announces the emission of a new Rs 100 note. Calibrating ATMs to the new banknote will only cause another wave of cash outages.

India is rushing to the printing press to meet sweeping demand for cash.

After Indian president Narendra Modi scraped 90% of the country's currency overnight to fight corruption, it's what he promoted most - digital money - that is making it particularly challenging to monitor expenditures prior to the election period.

As Facebook moves to get a piece of the payments app pie in India through its announced Whatsapp payments feature, the need to inform consumers about what's at stake with cashlessness is growing urgent.

Cash usage in India is back to pre-demonitisation levels despite the major digitisation push by the government and mobile payments app service providers.

Modi's demonitisation has had dramatic consequences on the Indian economy in general, and on the poor in particular.