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When Mrugank S., 33, an information technology professional in Bangalore, Karnataka, ordered five teaming carts of produce from Big Basket, an online grocery store, he chose “card-on-delivery” as the mode of payment. But when the two deliverymen wheeled up to his flat on the 14th floor of a tower, he pulled out a wad of bills.

Mr. Mrugank often uses his credit card, but that afternoon, nervous of a botched delivery, he turned to a reliable habit and pulled out 6,000 rupees, or $97, in cash, as most Indians do. “It is a little bit safer,” he said.

Had he chosen to pay with his credit card, one of the couriers would have pulled out a petite, rectangular device, which, when plugged into a headphone jack, turns any smartphone into a point-of-sale terminal, a vehicle for cashless payments.

Ezetap, a Bangalore startup that was formed in 2011, built the mobile payment device and partnered with Big Basket, the 2-year-old grocery delivery service in the city. Big Basket equipped each of its couriers with the hardware.

In the past two years, at least 10 new companies like Ezetap have begun operations in India, according to the investment-banking firm Avendus. Several more have sprung up from young technology companies and established banks, offering smartphone applications, software gizmos and online channels intent on pushing Indian commerce toward one of the nation’s most pervasive goods.

India has 554 million active cellphone users, yet only four percent use mobile banking. Still, the number of people who are weaning themselves off cash payments is steadily rising. There are roughly 910,000 point-of-sale terminals nationwide, according to the consultancy Deloitte. That is nearly double the totals from four years ago, but there is plenty of room for the noncash economy to grow. India currently has 758 point-of-sale-terminals for a million residents, considerably behind China at 1,700 per million and Brazil at 25,000 per million in 2009.

Entrepreneurs are convinced that India now has overcome the inertia to move from cash to digital payments. “People are still apprehensive about putting their credit card online,” largely because of security concerns, said Vipul Parekh, co-founder of Big Basket, which receives around 60 percent of its payments through cash on delivery. “But they are extremely comfortable using their mobiles.”

Ezetap operates much like Square, the celebrated California mobile payments company started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and has borrowed some of its aura. Last November, Ezetap raised $3.5 million from high-profile investors in the United States, including Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal.

In May, Ezetap became the first Indian terminal-maker to receive global certification from Europay, Mastercard and Visa. At the time, Som Mittal, president of the Indian software industry body Nasscom, lauded Ezetap as an exemplar of the “new age” of Indian technology.

Ezetap might be a new idea for India, but for one of its founders, it is not a first attempt to make mobile payments work in India.

In 2006, Sanjay Swamy, the energetic chairman of Ezetap, was selected as C.E.O. of mChek, a Bangalore company that linked bank accounts to mobile phones. Like Ezetap, investors warmly welcomed mChek. In 2008 and 2009, it raised $10 million from renowned venture capitalists abroad. It partnered with leading banks and telecom companies, allowing customers to pay bills with cards using their phones. In 2009, Mr. Swamy claimed over one million active users.

But then mChek suddenly fizzled out. Mr. Swamy left to join the Unique Identification Authority of India as a volunteer with the government’s project to assign each Indian an ID number. MChek quietly began to shed its deals and eventually folded.

“I would never do another startup that requires the volume of the ocean,” Mr. Swamy said. “We needed to get the regulators, we needed to get the banks, we needed to get the merchants.”

Trying to arrange mobile payments across multiple carriers and banks demanded cooperation across the dense layers of Indian commerce. All the obstacles made it more difficult for consumers to adopt the service. Mr. Swamy recalled a telling moment when a loyal customer, who had used mChek to pay bills for 18 months, suddenly stopped. A shop with Airtel services for bill paying opened up next to her home, and she found it easier to walk across the street.

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With Ezetap, Mr. Swamy and his three co-founders opted to skip the fickle consumers and focus only on the merchants that would benefit from cheap payment receptacles. The hardware costs roughly $50, plus a monthly fee of up to $6. In addition to Big Basket, Ezetap has signed up with online retailers and a microfinance group. “You pick one side of the problem,” Mr. Swamy explained.

Mchek’s failure hasn’t discouraged at least a dozen other companies from offering digital payment products, like mobile wallets, directly to consumers. Last week, One MobiKwik Systems, a startup in Gurgaon, introduced the country’s first consumer wallet, which allows users to stock cash into an account that can be used with 500 merchants nationwide.

Many startups aim to replicate the wild success of M-Pesa, the mobile-money system used by two-thirds of Kenya. (In April, M-Pesa began operating in India, through a partnership between Vodafone and ICICI Bank.)

“We believed, at one point in time, that mobile payments would be like telecom,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, C.E.O. of One97 Communication, which runs a mobile payment operator called Paytm. “But the government of India didn’t like that.”

As mobile payments began spreading globally, the Reserve Bank of India, or R.B.I., moved cautiously. In 2009, the central bank started requiring two-factor authentication to protect the main electronic transactions in India, debit cards and net banking. (Fewer than two percent of Indians own credit cards.) Mobile payers now have to move through multiple identification steps.

To operate without one bank partner, mobile payment providers also need an R.B.I. license. The central bank has primarily doled out three types of wallet licenses: open ones, given for bank-to-bank transfers; closed ones, which let owners fill wallets from their bank accounts and use them like vouchers; and ones somewhere in between, known as semiclosed.

Semiclosed wallets can be loaded with cash that can be used buy goods electronically. Over the summer, both MobiKwik and One97 were granted these five-year licenses, along with 21 others.

Semiclosed wallets do have one noteworthy drawback that its makers say keep them from wider use: a user can add cash but can’t draw it out. In May 2012, Bharti Airtel began offering Airtel Money, the first and only prepaid mobile wallet for a telecommunication company licensed by the R.B.I. The wallets see transactions totaling 15 million rupees a month. Yet only users with accounts at Axis Bank, Airtel’s partner, can withdraw cash.

Analysts say that for consumers, the current obstacles to mobile payments outweigh the rewards. “The motivation for a consumer to transition to a mobile wallet is very minimal,” said Aashish Bhinde, executive director of Avendus.

In a recent study, Avendus estimated that seven million transactions are completed through mobile wallets across India each month. But most payments are minuscule, averaging 260 rupees per transaction.

“At the end of the day,” Mr. Bhinde said, “mobile solves one part of the problem — it makes transactions less capital intensive. But you need a big push by the government for cashless options.”

In his inaugural speech on Sept. 4, Raghuram Rajan, the new central bank governor, devoted considerable attention to mobile money. He announced plans for a pilot project to allow cash withdrawals from prepaid wallets, as well as the potential for the transfer of funds to any handset. “Mobile payments,” Mr. Rajan said, “can be a game changer.”

Many mobile payment executives voiced skepticism of the R.B.I.’s ability to change anything, particularly with speed. In 2009, Beam Money, a mobile payment provider based in New Delhi, acquired an R.B.I. semiclosed wallet license with the hopes of expanding its payment channels beyond utilities. When it received the license, the company expected that personal transfers, from one wallet to another, and cash withdrawal would soon become legal, said its chairman, Anand Shrivastav. They did not.

Mr. Shrivastav discovered his customers could make certain purchases, but were restricted from others — they could buy a ticket from an airline, but not for a bus, for example. “There were so many ifs and buts,” he recalled. “How do we go and tell a customer that the R.B.I. is mandating this?”

This July, Beam Money relinquished its license, deeming it too much of a burden. Beam maintained its current business, offering mobile payments with select merchants. To the newest license holders, “I wish them luck,” Mr. Shrivastav said.

Bipin Preet Singh of MobiKwik however, remains bullish. He said two million customers now use his closed wallet services. With its new offering, the company plans to reach 100 million in two years. Mr. Swamy of Ezetap is equally ebullient, ticking off his company’s rapid reach into retail merchants.

These entrepreneurs face a larger hurdle than regulatory red tape. MasterCard, in its global report on mobile payments, ranks India near the bottom on knowledge of mobile options. Familiarity with mobile wallets remains MobiKwik’s biggest impediment, admitted Mr. Singh.

Consumer attitudes toward cashless payments also require a major shift. Even India’s wealthier, plugged-in consumers are reluctant to use mobile banking and frequent card payments. Some skepticism is surely from fear of fraud; Indian banks are not directly liable for fraudulent card transactions, although the R.B.I. is moving to amend the law.

And moving from India’s stubborn cash economy will require more than changes in consumer behavior. I rode back from Mr. Mrugank’s neighborhood in an Ola Cab, a taxi service that has also ties with Ezetap. The cab’s card terminal was broken. “Cash only,” said the driver.

Mark Bergen is a Bangalore-based freelance journalist.