NEW DELHI: Going by a number of decisions taken since February this year, it appears the Cabinet has been preparing for a cashless India from long before November 8.Of course, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the formal leap and scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in one fell swoop on the night of November 8.Still, a slew of moves, including a reduction in transaction fees, installing electronic payment modes and encouraging e-transactions on cheaper feature phones, had already paved the way for citizens to adopt and adapt to a cashless economy, once November 8 rolled round.To encourage digital/cashless payments government departments took the decision to absorb any transaction fees on payments made for state-provided services, including by Central Public Sector Enterprises.Digital purchases from these services were also incentivised.Salary distribution in central government departments began to be done through the Public Finance Management System By installing electronic modes of payment at 70 central government departments they saw digital transactions soar to 1.4 crore and worth Rs 3,250 crore. The Centre also persuaded electricity distribution companies and state governments to install such payment modes.A non-tax receipt portal, bharakosh.gov.in, was developed to enable users to make non-tax nine payments for as many as 237 categories of payments including for spectrum charges, RTI applications and the like.To encourage small merchants to accept digital payments without passing on associated charges to customers, the merchant discount rate on debit cards was waived until December 31 this year.Not everyone can afford smartphone and most mobile phone users in India use feature phones. To enable mobile banking on these simpler phones, USSD charges were reduced to Rs 0.50 per SMS from Rs.1.50 per SMS to Rs.0.50. An application for mobile phone payments in four languages was also developed.As for mobile banking on smartphones, the National Payments Corporation of India developed a Unified Payment Interface (UPI) application which 27 banks have already adopted.To slowly eliminate having to go to a physical bank for everything, mobile Banking through interoperable ATMs was launched. As many as 81,000 ATMs of 12 Banks are already live and another 15,000 machines are expected to go live shortly.