Amidst recording the highest number of transactions per person in states of Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra, More Indians are yet to take digital modes of payments during the pandemic, as central government data states, there is a difference in the rate of adoption among states. States of Chhattisgarh, Jammu & Kashmir, North-Eastern states like Mizoram, Manipur, and Meghalaya are yet to include digital payment modes.

Leading the transaction per person with 38.4 transactions where Indians averaged 3.85 transactions per person between July 2019 and July 2020 is Chandigarh. Record by Digidhan database, maintained by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity), Delhi has an average of 9.3 transactions per person. MeitY tracks digital transactions of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) operated channels.

Digital payment channels include – RuPay cards, BHIM – the Unified Payments Interface, NPCI interface and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD)-based cellular transfer, measured on a twelve-month cycle.

The increase in digital payments is due to the campaigns in states like Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh’s small towns. The campaigns explored the areas of higher income levels, better internet and banking infrastructure, reliable power source as the factors involved in it.

Harshil Mathur, CEO, RazorPay, said, “High-speed internet and deployment of devices is the most important factor.” RazorPay has almost 1 million merchants in India and it recorded most transactions from Karnataka, Telangana, and Maharashtra during the three-month Covid-19 pandemic. Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra are ahead with the highest per capita transaction rates of 17.6, 12.4, and 6.9 respectively from July 2019 to July 2020, Digidhan data report.

The states that have limited internet access, huge rural population, get challenges regularly to move cash to digital, industry and government data suggests.

Vishal Patel, CEO, CC Avenue, said, “Factors like higher per capita income, the familiarity of English language, a good bandwidth, banking, and financial infrastructure, internet service, communication devices, and 24*7 power supply are responsible for this.”

Chhattisgarh had per capita transaction rate of 0.4, while Jammu and Kashmir recorded transaction rates of 0.7. Mizoram, Manipur, and Meghalaya also had the rate below 1 per person.

Though the database doesn’t offer a periodic comparison between months, data experts suggest that the rise of digital payments is one of the key features in India during the pandemic time.

In June and July, NPCI noticed UPI, Bharat Bill Payment System, and IMPS clock record number of transactions.

The numbers of the unified payment interface increased tremendously in July with 1.5 billion transactions of Rs.3 lakh crore. It’s a jump of 15 percent from the pre-COVID levels which recorded 1.32 billion transactions of Rs. 2.3 lakh crore in February.

Industry personnel determined a significant increase from tier 2 and tier towns in the pandemic time with large part coming from online bill payment facilities.

“70 percent of the transactions are from tier 2 and 3 locations,” stated Karthik Raghupahty, VP Strategy & Business Development, PhonePe. He said, “Top cities like Indore, Nagpur, Aurangabad, Surat, Jaipur Patna, Chittoor, Kurnool, Vijaywada and Guntur are among the high ranked cities for PhonePe.”

PhonePe’s maximum transactions are from Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.