Bharat Bill Payment System (BPPS)
The top 20 cities in the country generated 3000 crore bills for electricity last year. These bills collectively amounted to Rs. 6.22 lakh crore. Soon all your electric bills can be pay at a central location instantly by the BPPS.
What is the BPPS?
After the successful launch of the Unified Payment Interface, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has now brought forward the Bharat Bill Payment System or BBPS in short. This will help the customers pay their bills without any cash and within an instant. The bills can now be paid via electronic methods from anywhere.
This has been brought forward after RBI showed the way to the country. Yes indeed it was RBI’s idea. In 2014 RBI has mentioned that BBPS can offer the seamless experience of bill payments by multiple vendors, via multiple methods and they can also help the payments to be processed and accumulated instantly. This will inadvertently save a lot of time of the citizens and will also clear any manual error related to the transactions.
The organizations for such transactions
Since it is the matter of bill payments, the government has to be really strict about the vendors they choose. Any malfunction can result in a huge loss of property and can fail the project. This is why out of the many units that showed interest in providing these services, 62 have been chosen by the RBI. Among these 62 units 10 are non banking ones while 52 are banking units. Even mobile wallets and e-commerce portals have applied to take up this offer. Together these payment gateways are being called Bharat bill payment operating units or BBPOU. As per the RBI regulations, all transactions will now be done via BBPOUs only.
For this reason the guidelines for their operations have been published in November, 2014. Among these 62 units the pilot batch is set to be live with 26 operators. The RBI has been very thorough with their processing system. They have declared that earlier they had been approached by several non banking and banking institutions to carry out this programme. They have now selected the best among them for it,
Let us take a look at the achievements so far
So the first phase is supposed to give the government insights about the functioning and the loopholes of the system. The first phase will tell the government what are the processes that they can move forward with. So here are a few things to note about it:
- In the first phase itself, majority of the household bills such as DTH bills, gas, water and electricity have been covered. Now it will be extended to other areas as well.
- Since NPCI is acting as the unit of transaction via the vendors, all the bills paid will be verified and approved by them. They will also process the bills related to the settlement items.
- NPCI would create networks of agents using automated modes which will in turn help to create the gateways to accept every kind of payments.
Overview
| Sl. No. | Data | Info |
| 1 | Banks participating as BBPOUs | Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, etc |
| 2 | Non Banks participating as BBPOUs | Common Service Centre, ITZ Cash card, Paytm, etc. |
| 3 | Full form of BBPCU | Bharat Bill Payment Central Unit |
| 4 | Authorized BBPCU | NPCI |
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