RBI’s Digital Payment Index

The Reserve Bank of India has started a composite Digital Payments Index (DPI) on January 1, 2021, to know the extent of digitization in payments in the country. As per the index, there has been a significant rise in digital payment in the recent past.

Key Points

• The Digital Payments Index (DPI) of RBI has been prepared on the basis of 5 broad parameters- Consumer Centricity, Payment Infrastructure – Supply-side factors, Payment Infrastructure – Demand-side factors, Payment Enablers, and Payment Performance.
• All these broad parameters also have sub-parameters.
• The base period for preparing this DPI index has been taken as “the year 2018”. So, the index has been prepared by capturing the increase in digital payments from the base year 2018 and setting the DPI score for the year as 100.
• As per the DPI Index released by RBI, the DPI score for March 2019 has been calculated as 153.47 while the DPI score for March 2020 is 207.84.
• RBI will be publishing this index on a semi-annual basis from March 2021.
• This plan of releasing the DPI was initially announced in February 2020.

Digital Transactions

As per the RBI data, digital transactions have picked momentum from November 2020, supported by both retail and wholesale transactions.

In the retail segment, NEFT transactions grew by 27.9% in November 2020 as compared to the growth of 20.1 percent recorded in October.