The government is planning to make informed consent mandatory for direct benefit transfers (DBT). "Customers will now have to explicitly specify, which bank account do they wish to receive subsidy,” said a senior official in NPCI. The DBT mission alongwith NPCI and Indian Bank Association (IBA) has already started working on this.
The need to make informed consent mandatory emanated from Airtel Payment Bank's latest case of opening accounts without customers knowing about it. These were customers who had an existing account with other banks where DBT subsidy was flowing in. Now, under the rules, the last seeded account becomes the one that receives the subsidy. Airtel opened new accounts and subsidy started flowing into these accounts. However, people were not aware of the subsidy money coming into a new account, leading to confusion.
LPG subsidy in Airtel Payment Bank account stood at Rs 168 crore at the end of November. "With a new set of banks coming in payment banks and small finance banks, and everybody vying to get a larger share of saving accounts, the scenario is likely to get repeated. The solution is to get customers to indicate which bank account do they want the subsidy,” said Abhishek Sinha, CEO, EKO Financial Services, a fintech company that also serves as a business correspondent to SBI and various other banks.
UIDAI on its part has temporarily barred Bharti Airtel and Airtel Payments Bank from conducting Aadhaar-based SIM verification of mobile customers using the e-KYC process, as well as e-KYC of Payments Bank clients. UIDAI ordered PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to conduct an audit of Bharti Airtel and Airtel Payments Bank to ascertain if their systems and processes are in compliance with the Aadhaar Act, 2016.
The government claims to have saved a whopping Rs 57,000 crore under Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme. Of the Rs 57,029 crore saved under DBT in 2016-17, the LPG subsidy scheme 'Pahal' accounted for Rs 29,769 crore.
