Digital Payments on the Agenda: How Supply-side Actors Framed Cash and Digital Payments during the COVID-19 Pandemic in India

ABSTRACT

Debates about the increase in digital payments during COVID-19 have primarily focused on behavioural change among consumers. Using India as a case study, this article documents how supply-side actors (political, economic, financial and technological) used the pandemic to generate a new public consensus about digital payments. The article argues that these actors framed the agenda to draw public attention on cash and digital payments during the COVID-19 pandemic, that this new consensus extended and deviated from narratives created during the Digital India (2015) and demonetisation (2016) debates, and that trade bodies and businesses unrelated to banking, finance and technology were active in setting this new agenda. Agenda-setting in the pandemic era continues to mould the payments trajectory in both India and elsewhere. In India, we argue, it has challenged aspects of cash that previously elicited trust: its materiality and associated social interaction. Consequently, older agendas have been promoted, and digital (and especially contactless) payments have assumed a new level of importance to economic life in India.

KEYWORDS:

• Contactless payments
• digital payments
• India
• COVID-19
• agenda-setting
• Digital India
• cashlessness
• demonetisation
• payments infrastructure

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped shape the final version of the article significantly.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Such as the bank reports mentioned earlier.

² Studies have focused on such behavioural change in many countries, such as India (Revathy & Balaji, 2020), Jordan (Al Nawayseh, 2021), Hungary (Daragmeh et al., 2021), Indonesia (Musyaffi et al., 2021) and China (Zhao & Bacao, 2021).

³ Details of Twitter data cited included in footnotes.

⁴ This document, provided by a banker, is not publicly available.

⁵ RBI Twitter handle: https://twitter.com/RBI/status/1243522318397132800.

⁶ A global agenda for greater financial inclusion has been concomitant with a push for digital payments in developing countries (Mader, 2016; Maurer, 2012; 2015).

⁷ SBI and Titan collaboratively introduced a contactless payment watch in September 2020. Google, meanwhile, collaborated with SBI and Axis Bank Visa cards in August 2020 so that Google phones could be used as a contactless device through the GPay app.