Andhra CM Meets RBI Brass, Chief Ministers’ Panel Members Skip Meeting

AP Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu on Thursday met the Reserve Bank brass and top bankers in Mumbai to review the ground-level situation following the scrapping of high value notes, even as other chief ministers skipped the meeting.
Apart from Naidu, the members of the committee includeMadhya Pradesh’s Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Odisha’s Naveen Patnaik, Sikkim’s Pawan Kumar Chamling, Puducherry’s V Narayanasamy (Congress), Maharashtra’s Devendra Fadnavis along with NITI Aayog vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya, and its chief executive Amitabh Kant.

The panel was formed last month-end to outline measures to promote digital payment systems to promote transparency, financial inclusion and also prepare a roadmap for the same.
Mr Naidu, apart from the RBI brass, met bankers like SBI chair Arundhati Bhattacharya, ICICI Bank’s Chanda Kochhar, Aditya Puri of HDFC Bank, Axis Bank’s Shikha Sharma, and PS Jayakumar of Bank of Baroda and also National Payments Corporation chief AP Hota.

According to the sources the panel discussed how to widen the use of the existing infrastructure such as Aadhaar-enabled systems,points of sale (PoS) ,unified payment interface (UPI) and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), to improve digitisation, apart from building additional infra for a cashless economy at the states level.