RBI extends PIDF scheme by 2 years till December 2025

The RBI on Friday extended the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) Scheme by two years till December 2025, and also widened the scope to provide subsidy by including sound box instruments and Aadhaar-enabled biometric devices.

The corpus of PIDF stands at Rs 1,026.37 crore as on November 30, 2023.

The PIDF scheme was operationalised by the Reserve Bank in January 2021 for three years.

The objective of the scheme was to encourage deployment of payment acceptance infrastructure such as physical Point of Sale (PoS) terminals, Quick Response (QR) codes, in tier-3 to tier-6 centres, North Eastern states and Union Territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh.

In a statement, the central bank said it has now decided to extend the PIDF scheme by a further period of two years -- up to December 31, 2025.

To widen the scope of beneficiaries, persons eligible under the PM Vishwakarma Scheme in all centres have been included as merchants under the PIDF scheme.

In order to promote acceptance infrastructure, sound box devices and Aadhaar-enabled biometric devices are now eligible for claim of subsidy under the PIDF scheme.

RBI also said that subsidies for special focus areas -- North Eastern states and UTs of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, have been made uniform at 90 per cent of the cost of the device.

The number of payment acceptance devices deployed under the PIDF scheme at end-November, 2023, stood at 8,27,901 (physical devices) and 2,71,95,902 (digital devices).

Physical devices include PoS, mPoS (mobile PoS), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), and PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).

Inter-operable QR code-based payments such as UPI QR, and Bharat QR are digital devices.