NRIs get RBI's helping hand! Payment of families' electricity, other bills made easier

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday proposed enabling of Bharat Bill Payment System for cross-border inward bill payments, a step that could greatly benefit senior citizens.

RBI governor Shaktikanta Das, in his bi-monthly monetary policy statement for August, stated, "It is now proposed to enable BBPS (Bharat Bill Payment System) to accept cross-border inward bill payments.

"This will enable Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) to undertake bill payments for utility, education and other such payments on behalf of their families in India," the RBI chief added.

Once the process finalises, people staying outside India (NRIs per se) can easily make their families' electricity, other utility bills and education payments back home with ease.

"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," said Pranay Jhaveri, Managing Director - India & South Asia, Euronet Worldwide.

The BBPS is an interoperable platform for standardised bill payments.

More than 20,000 billers are part of the system, and more than 8 crore transactions are processed monthly.

Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank hiked the key policy repo rate by 50 basis points to 5.40 per cent, marking a third straight increase that took the key lending rate above the pre-pandemic level.

The rate hike comes on the heels of high stubbornly high inflation, which stayed above RBI's upper tolerance limit of 6 per cent for the sixth straight month in July.