Page 54 - Banking Finance April 2021

RBI CIRCULAR

that there are branches of banks that are outside any at the Receiving/Nodal/Focal Point branches of your
formal clearing arrangement and their customers face bank for the Financial Year 2019-20.
hardships due to longer time taken and cost involved
2. The Government of India has decided that the date of
in collection of cheques presented by them.
closure of residual transactions for the month of March
3. To leverage the availability of CTS and provide uniform 2021 be fixed as April 10, 2021. In view of the ensuing
customer experience irrespective of location of her/his closing of government accounts for the financial year
bank branch, it has been decided to extend CTS across 2020-21, receiving branches including those not
all bank branches in the country. To facilitate this, banks situated locally, should adopt special arrangements such
shall have to ensure that all their branches participate as courier service etc., for passing on challans/scrolls
in image-based CTS under respective grids by etc., to the Nodal/Focal Point branches so that all
September 30, 2021. They are free to adopt a model payments and collections made on behalf of
of their choice, like deploying suitable infrastructure in government towards the end of March are accounted
every branch or following a hub & spoke model, etc. for in the same financial year. These instructions
and concerned banks shall coordinate with the regarding special messenger arrangements may please
respective Regional Offices of RBI to operationalise this. be informed to all branches concerned.
4. Banks are advised to inform us (helpdpss@rbi.org.in) 3. As regards reporting of March 2021 transactions by
the roadmap to achieve pan-India coverage of CTS and Nodal/Focal Point branches in April 2021, the branches
submit a status report before April 30, 2021. may be advised to follow the procedure as outlined in
the Annex. To sum up, the nodal/Focal Point branches
5. This directive is issued under Section 10 (2) read with
Section 18 of Payment and Settlement Systems Act, will be required to prepare separate set of scrolls, one
2007 (Act 51 of 2007). pertaining to March 2021 residual transactions and
another for April transactions during the first 10 days of
(P Vasudevan) April 2021. The Nodal/Focal Point branches should also
Chief General Manager ensure that the accounts for all transactions (revenues/
tax collections/payments) are effected at the receiving
branches up to March 31, 2021 in the accounts for the
Reporting and Accounting of Central
current financial year itself and are not mixed up with
Government transactions of March 2021 the transactions of April 2021. Also, while reporting
transactions pertaining to March 2021 up to April 10,
RBI/2020-21/108
March 18, 2021 2021, the transactions of April 2021 should not be mixed
up with the residual transactions relating to March 2021.
1. Please refer to Circular DGBA.GBD.No.1744/42.01.029/ 4. Kindly issue necessary instructions in the matter to your
2019-20 dated March 17, 2020 advising the procedure branches concerned immediately.
to be followed for reporting and accounting of Central
Government transactions (including CBDT, CBIC, (R. Kamalakannan)
Departmentalized Ministries and Non-Civil Ministries) Chief General Manager

NPCI to introduce new digital payments product for feature phones
National Payments Corporation of India has recently stated that it is working on a digital payments product for feature
phone users and those who are not too comfortable using mobile apps. According to Praveena Rai, Chief Operating Officer,
NPCI, the product is at the proof of concept stage right now. This new product will help further the NPCI's goal of taking
digital payments to every Indian. "We need to move into the market which is feature phone-based… Moving towards voice-
enabled payments will be the trend of digital payments that we should see and India will be a clear innovator there,", Rai
added. While an SMS-based payment solution called Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) was launched by
NPCI in 2016, its use later got discontinued with the launch of the Bharat Interface for Payments (BHIM) app in late 2017.

54 | 2021 | APRIL | BANKING FINANCE