Making Small Payments Work
Cashless payments are getting a lot of attention
nowadays, but have you seen an auto not affiliated to Ola which accepts a cashless
payment? I haven’t seen one! I believe that the notion of cashless payments is
a bit forbidding for a significant fraction of the people, including many auto
drivers. When I talk about auto drivers, it includes people manning small shops
as well. I had filed a related post earlier. Visit
A society that does not facilitate cashless transactions
is a senseless society. The issue is not merely one of black money; it is also
about avoiding waste of people’s time.
Why do so many of our people insist on continuing to use
cash? I believe that that technical people involved should study the
difficulties new users of technology face and work to eliminate these
difficulties. Using technology should make transactions easier, not harder! The
app on a mobile phone should require very little from the customer making a
payment or the driver receiving it. You should be able to touch the app’s icon,
point the phone’s camera at the auto’s meter or a similar display in a shop and
touch the icon a second time. That should transfer money from your bank account
to the recipient’s bank account or digital wallet. Who has a wallet, who uses a
bank account, what is the name of the bank, etc., should be irrelevant at the
moment the transaction occurs. Neither the customer nor the recipient of the
payment should have to enter any numbers or addresses into a phone.
Character recognition is robust enough to let the app
read off the amount to be paid as displayed; the app should similarly read the
recipient’s Unified Payments Interface
address from a sticker on the meter. (For information on UPI, visit Unified
Payments Interface).
While the front end described above has to be
implemented, UPI already provides you the infrastructure to support it. I
believe that student projects can easily achieve the goal of demonstrating such
a user-friendly front-end for cashless transactions, integrated into the UPI
network. A word for those who wish to carry out this project: print information
to be read by the app using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) font. This
may not be necessary if you use a standardized font carefully chosen for the
purpose, but it may simplify your task.
