Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s goal of getting an additional 10 lakh point of sales (PoS) machines installed in the country by March to facilitate non-cash transactions may come a cropper because vendors and banks are not in a position to meet the target.
While banks are targeting their current account holders to install these machines, they say issues such as the shortage of hardware, lack of manpower to deploy the devices and the limited number of merchants who can show healthy transaction levels on their terminals are hindering the initiative.
Bankers said that even though there has been a huge uptick in installation of PoS terminals after the government invalidated high denomination currency notes in November, adding 10 lakh machines by the end of March appears almost impossible. Additionally, the target of deploying 20 lakh aadhar enabled terminals by September is also steep.
The country had more than 15 lakh PoS terminals as of october, 2016 according to data with Reserve Bank of India. The government’s target means an increase of 67 per cent. Bankers said that there are huge operational challenges to both manufacturing and installation of terminals at such scale.
By Baishakhi Dutta
