-The Times of India MUMBAI: The government has prematurely withdrawn a scheme under which shopkeepers would get an incentive of up to Rs 1,000 for accepting payments using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Another one providing customers cashbacks of up to Rs 500 has also been withdrawn and replaced with a scheme that provides rewards of up to Rs 150 but only for Bhim app users. The move to withdraw the incentives...

-The Economic Times The world’s oldest networked infrastructure, money, is increasingly dematerialising and fusing with the world’s latest networked infrastructure, the Internet. As the network effects compound, disruptive acceleration hurtle us towards financial utopia, or dystopia. Our fate depends on what we get right and what we get wrong with the law, code and architecture, and the market. The Internet, unfortunately, has completely transformed from how it was first architected. From a...

-The Economic Times In over a decade, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has been instrumental in providing employment to rural households. One of its key provisions is that once the work week is completed, the worker must be paid within 15 days. Millions depend on the timely payment of these wages. The payments process has made many strides in the last decade, from cash payments to wages being...

-The Hindu According to the latest rules, ‘explicitly informed consent’ from customers has been made compulsory. Following the Airtel India-Aadhaar subsidy fiasco, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on Tuesday has tightened the norms for mapping Aadhaar number to a different bank account. According to the latest rules, ‘explicitly informed consent’ from customers has been made compulsory. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) will disable the override feature that UIDAI said was...

-The Economic Times More than 23 lakh customers have received cooking gas subsidy of Rs 47 crore in their respective Airtel Bank accounts they don’t seem to have opened, prompting the government to intervene even as the top mobile operator denied any wrongdoing. Consumers receive cooking gas subsidy in their bank accounts linked to their unique biometric identity, or Aadhaar. But after several consumers lately complained about not receiving subsidy, it emerged...