New Delhi: Central government departments and ministries on Monday submitted their plans to achieve the government target of 25 billion digital transactions in 2017-18.

As many as 16 government departments and ministries attended a workshop on digital payments organized by the IT ministry where the plans were presented, according to secretary in the ministry of electronics and information technology (MEITY), Aruna Sundararajan.

The plans will be put to action from this month.

“All the major government departments which have maximum citizen touchpoints for digital payments attended the workshop. They made detailed presentations on how they would go about the digital payment initiative, the strategy and action plan to achieve this," said Sundararajan.

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“The points of discussion included how many point-of-sale (POS) machines will be deployed on ground, how many of their touchpoints will be digitized and also how many of these touchpoints will be Aadhaar Pay-enabled, how will they enable the citizens to make payments to the government and how the direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme will be channelized through digital modes," she added.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley, during his budget speech, had announced the setting up of a mission to promote cashless transactions with a target of touching 25 billion digital transactions in 2017-18.

“This will be done through UPI (unified payments interface), USSD (unstructured supplementary service data), Aadhaar Pay, IMPS (immediate payment service) and debit cards," said Jaitley, while presenting the Union budget 2017-18 in the Parliament.

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Aadhaar Pay, a merchant version of Aadhar Enabled Payment System, was launched on 7 March.

The workshop was a part of the National Digital Payment Mission, an entity mooted by the government to promote digital payment in the budget and executed by MEITY.

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