Bharat Bill Payment System: The Reserve Bank of India has given a good news to senior citizens whose children live abroad. It happens often that senior citizens living in India and having NRI children face issues regarding payments of bills, utilities and others. The RBI has now proposed to enable the Bharat Bill Payment System to accept the cross border inward bill payments on behalf of families living in India to help these people. This will enable non-resident Indians to undertake bill payments utility, education and other such payment on behalf of their families in India.
“BBPS is currently accessible only for residents in India. To facilitate Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) undertake utility, education and other bill payments on behalf of their families in India, it is proposed to enable BBPS to accept cross-border inward payments. This will also benefit payment of bills of any biller onboarded on the BBPS platform in an interoperable manner,” the RBI said in a statement announcing its Monetary Policy Committee meet decisions.
Over 20,000 billers are part of the system, and more than eight crore transactions are processed on a monthly basis. NRIs will now have access to all of them. Instructions regarding the operations, applicability and others will be announced soon, the central bank said.
How Will the Bharat Bill Payment System Help NRIs Whose Parents Live in India?
“The announcement by RBI to allow NRIs to pay bills for their family members in India directly on BBPS, depicts a further liberalisation measure on cross-border payment transactions front. Rather than transmitting money to Indian accounts and using it to pay such bills, NRIs will be able to directly pay such bills on BBPS. This will enhance ease and reduce delayed payments, thereby benefitting the economic ecosystem as a whole,” said Sudhir Sharma, senior partner at DSK Legal told News18.com.
BBS will act as a bridge between NRIs and their families when it comes to make payments easily. “The primary function of BBPS is to enable non-resident Indians to make direct payments of various utilities such as water bill, electricity bill or telecom for their respective families in India via the BBPS platform. The BBPS platform will be the facilitator for the payments between the individuals utilising the service, the service providers and the ones making the payment.
“Thus, BBPS will be a bridge between the non-resident Indians, their families in India and the service providers, ensuring all stakeholders benefit from the same,” Suvigya Awasthy, associate partner at PSL Advocates & Solicitors told News18.com.
“This is a step to empower and enable the large Indian diaspora to support their families especially senior citizens by taking away the burden of mundane and recurring bill payments. It is a step in the right direction to continue growing BBPS with a new use case as it may get additional foreign exchange into the country. We will have to await specific directions in terms of implementation and compliance,” added Pranay Jhaveri, managing director – India and South Asia, Euronet Worldwide
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