Indian Govt wants to go cashless but it is attainable within deadline? Find out

The Indian Government is pushing people towards cashless transactions and selling digital economy dreams. But, one thing that it requires to achieve this is the Point of Sales (PoS) machines, or the swipe machines, which is a concern now.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's plans to get an additional 10 lakh PoS machines installed in India by March for cashless transactions, however, the banks say the target is not attainable.

"If we have to attain the target, we have to deploy somewhere around 30,000 terminals per week. We used to do 6,000 terminals in a month, which we have increased to almost 10,000 per week - scaling it up to 30,000 is not possible at this juncture,” a senior official with one of the large banks told ET.

Banks say there are other issues also involved such as customer and merchant knowledge, manpower, training, etc.

Besides, the government’s the target of deploying 20 lakh Aadhaar-enabled terminals by September is also blurry.

The country had more than 15 lakh PoS terminals as of October 2016, according to data with the Reserve Bank of India.

The government's target means an increase of 67%. Bankers said there are huge operational challenges to both manufacturing and installation of terminals at such a scale.