India is undergoing a digital-payment revolution
of the 150-year-old Chor Bazaar, a colourfully named flea market in Mumbai, are crammed with goats, used tyres, speakers, drills and other assorted ephemera. But even in this unlikely place, modern payment methods are gaining a foothold. In stalls abutting the market, bags of sand can be paid for by providing a phone number or scanning a code.
It is one that has been shaped, not always intentionally, by government policies. September 2010 saw the arrival of Aadhaar, a system of biometrics that could be used to open a bank account. After becoming prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi chivvied bankers to open accounts for everyone. Around 360m basic “Jan Dhan” accounts were opened, adding to the 243m accounts already in existence.
Paytm now claims 371m users. PhonePe, a subsidiary of Walmart-owned Flipkart, claims more than 150m, and, run by a government-led bank co-operative, 46m. The value of digital transactions has risen more than 50-fold in the past two years, with many more smaller payments .
The global tech giants like the look of it, too. Google Pay is already available in India and Amazon Pay plans to launch soon. WhatsApp, which has 300m Indian users, has run a trial of a payments service with 1m of them, though the government’s requests regarding privacy and data-localisation are delaying it going nationwide.
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