New Delhi: With the aim of incentivizing digital payments, the government on Sunday launched digital lottery schemes—Lucky Grahak Yojana for consumers and Digi Dhan Vyapar Yojana for merchants.

A total of 15,000 winners were announced after the first lucky draw, selected from 8 crore digital transactions made between 9 November and 21 December.

Only transactions processed through RuPay cards, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and Aadhaar-Enabled Payment System (AEPS) are part of the schemes.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) announced that the winners of the lucky draw will receive a message from their banks and the reward money will be credited into their bank accounts over the next 24 hours. Citizens may check if they have received the reward by logging on to: www.digidhanlucky.mygov.in.

The lottery schemes, conceptualized by NPCI on the request of think tank NITI Aayog, aim to provide incentives to the poor and lower middle class and small businesses to adopt digital modes of payments like UPI, USSD, RuPay and AEPS.

“India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world despite the slowdown. India has huge potential to transform the economy into a digital one. Of 125 crore people, 75 crore use credit and debit cards. Of these, 45 crore are active users. With incentive schemes like Lucky Grahak Yojana and Digi DhanVyapar Yojana, the Digital India movement will certainly strengthen the country’s economic backbone," said finance minister Arun Jaitley during the event.

The winners of Lucky Grahak Yojana and the Digi-DhanVyaparYojana will be selected on a daily and weekly basis, respectively, leading up to a mega draw on 14 April 2017, after which the scheme will be reviewed.

—Total numbers of winners: 15,000

—Unstructured Supplementary Service Data: 100 winners from 15 banks

—Unified Payment Interface: 1,500 winners from 25 banks

—Aadhaar-Enabled Payment System: 1,500 winners from 49 banks

—RuPay: 11,900 winners from 234 banks

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