As of April 30, 2022, more than 4.11 lakh PoS, mobile PoS and other physical devices have been deployed across the country under the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) scheme, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said on Thursday. In addition, the programme has deployed 1,14,05,116 digital devices, including interoperable QR code-based payments such as UPI QR and Bharat QR.

The PIDF is planned to be implemented by the RBI in January 2021, subsidising the deployment of Point-of-Sale (PoS) infrastructure (physical and digital) in Tier 3 to Tier 6 centres and northeastern states in the country. It also covers beneficiaries of PM street vendor AtmaNirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi programme) at primary and secondary centres from August 26 2021.

RBI Authorised Card Network and Card Issuing Banks donate to PIDF; RBI says the current corpus is Rs 811.4 crore. Acquirers (banks and non-banks) registered under the PIDF program commit to deploy targets by region, submit deployment statistics, and apply for subsidies for equipment that meets specified standards.

On Wednesday, the RBI announced that to facilitate payment acceptance touchpoints further, it is revising the PIDF scheme, increasing the subsidy amount and simplifying the subsidy application process. This will further accelerate the deployment of payment acceptance touchpoints across the country, especially in rural areas.

The central bank said that all eligible installations might be more inclined to make claims under the revised scheme since the scheme was launched.