Cashless India

Promoting Digital Payments within Government

Guidelines for the Electronic Payment & Receipts for Cashless Services

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India envisages Paperless, Cashless and Faceless services across the country, especially in rural and remote parts of India. MeitY further envisages common e-Governance infrastructure that will offer end-to-end transactional experience for a citizen, businesses as well as internal government functions, which includes accessing various services and making payments and receipts through electronic modes. The Apex Committee on Digital India has recommended a targeted and time bound approach to implement digital payments for citizens across all the e-Services of Government Ministries and Departments. Against this backdrop, MeitY has notified Guideline for Electronic Payments and Receipts (EPR), intended for Central Public Sector Undertakings, State Governments, Govt. of India Autonomous Bodies, and Municipalities for expeditiously implementing appropriate mechanism to enable electronic payments and receipts. The objective of this guideline is to provide guidelines for Departments to:

  • Assess various services involving payments and receipts by types of services and level of electronic payment enablement
  • Provide actionable instructions for universal adoption of electronic payment modes for each type of service through various payment channels
  • Provide guidelines on engagement with various payment service providers

The Guidelines for Electronic Payments and Receipts (EPR) will be implemented through assessment of the department’s overall status of services offered and maintain a repository of services offered by departments. This repository will be used for measuring and tracking of adoption level electronic payments across departments in India. Furthermore, information of departments requiring payments integration will be shared with Government and private sector Payment Systems providers (PSPs) for enablement of Electronic modes and channels of payments. For detailed guidelines, please refer the EPR guidelines.

For details, please refer Guidelines for Adoption of Electronic Payments and Receipts (EPR) (Size - 0.8 MB).


With an aim to promote Digital Payments and converting India to a less-cash society, a large number of policy and implementation initiatives are being taken by the Government for its procurement, service offering and disbursements.

Government Departments to make e-payments to suppliers for bills above Rs. 5,000/- dated 05.12.2016 (Size - 307 KB)


  • D/o Financial Services (DFS) letter to Indian Banks Association (IBA) requesting that Banks should proactively promote digital transactions and take all necessary steps to make them cheaper for customers than cash transactions. dated 05.07.2017pdf icon (Size - 223 KB)
  • D/o Financial Services (DFS) letter to Indian Banks Association (IBA) requesting that except charges prescribed by RBI, banks not charge merchants and customers for debit card, UPI & USSD transactions. dated 08.08.2017pdf icon (Size - 533 KB)
  • Reminder D/o Financial Services (DFS) letter to Indian Banks Association (IBA) requesting that Banks should proactively promote digital transactions and take all necessary steps to make them cheaper for customers than cash transactions. dated 08.08.2017pdf icon (Size - 377 KB)
  • D/o Financial Services (DFS) letter to Public Sector Banks to not impose any additional charges for digital transactions, other than those prescribed by RBI. dated 08.08.2017pdf icon (Size - 497 KB)