India's digital payments infra to grow three-fold in 2017: Govt

New Delhi: The infrastructure of digital payments in India is expected to increase three-fold by the end of 2017 with almost five million electronic point of sale (PoS) machines, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) said on Wednesday.

"We expect that by December, the number will actually go up to five million PoS, which means that the infrastructure for digital payments is going to grow three times in the short span of one year," MeitY Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said here.

Sundararajan said the use of PoS machines in the country has already doubled since the government`s demonetisation move.

"We know that in the last 30 years... or even a little longer... since the digital payments have been around, we had about 1.5 million electronic PoS (machines). In the last four months since demonetisation, this number has doubled and today we are at three million PoS," she said.

Sundararajan spoke at the launch of a joint report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Nielsen titled `Index of Internet Readiness of Indian States`.