Lucky Grahak and Digi-Dhan Vyapar Yojana

The Government of India seeks to promote digital payment methods to encourage consumers and merchants to increasingly shift to these payment modes. The two schemes, namely Lucky Grahak Yojana for Consumers and Digi-Dhan Vyapar Yojana for Merchants were launched to nudge people towards significantly higher usage of digital transactions through the offer of incentives.

The Lucky Grahak Yojana and the Digi-Dhan Vyapar Yojana offered cash awards to consumers and merchants who utilized digital payment instruments for personal consumption expenditures. The scheme specially focused on bringing the poor, lower middle class and small businesses into the digital payment fold. The National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) implemented the scheme.

Duration of the scheme

The scheme was operational during the period 25^th December, 2016 to 14^th April 2017.

Components of the scheme

The scheme comprised of two major components, one for the Consumers and the other for the Merchants:

Lucky Grahak Yojana (Consumers)

Eligibility criteria

• All Consumer to Merchants, Consumer to Government and all AEPS transactions done from November 8, 2017 were eligible. Person to Person and Business to Business transfers were not eligible.
• Customers and merchants using RuPay Card, BHIM, UPI (Bharat Interface for Money/Unified Payment Interface), USSD based *99# service and Aadhaar enabled Payment Service (AePS) were eligible for participating in the daily and weekly lucky draws. Transactions through Credit cards/ e wallets were not eligible.
• Transactions between Rs 50 - Rs 3,000.

Awards

• Daily reward of Rs 1000 was given to 15,000 lucky Consumers for a period of 100 days
• Weekly prizes worth a maximum of Rs 1 lakh to 7000 Consumers

• 3 Mega Prizes for consumers worth Rs 1 cr, 50 lakh, 25 lakh for digital transactions between 8^th November, 2016 to 13^th April, 2017

Digi Dhan Vyapar Yojana (Merchants)

• Prizes for Merchants for all digital transactions conducted at Merchant establishments
• Weekly prizes worth a maximum of Rs. 50,000 to 7000 merchants

• 3 Mega Prizes for merchants worth Rs 50 lakhs, 25 lakh, 12 lakh for digital transactions between 8^th November, 2016 to 13th April, 2017
  

Process

The winners were identified through a random draw of the eligible Transaction IDs (which are generated automatically as soon as the transaction is completed] by software specially developed by NPCI for this purpose. The winners of lucky draw receive a message from their banks and the reward money is credited into their bank accounts over the next 24 hours.

The draws for these events took place in 100 different cities around India, in an event at each of these cities where DigiDhan Mela was also organised. Presence of various stakeholders of the digital payment ecosystem, like banks, wallets, telecom service providers, other financial service providers, UIDAI at these Digidhan Melas provided the opportunity to the citizens – both consumers and merchants – to get educated about digital payment options available, the ease of use and also benefit from hand holding provided by the service providers which would encourage wide-scale adoption of digital payments methods. In the long term such a mass movement is expected to shift large sections of the consumer and producer sections which was hitherto in the informal sector to the formal fold of the economy.

Source : NITI Ayog

Progress made as on April 14, 2017

• 100 Digi Dhan Melas held in 100 cities all over the country.
• 100 day long information, education and communication campaign led by NITI Aayog to make digital payments a mass movement in India.
• At least 15,000 institutions have gone cashless across just these 100 rural and urban cities across each one of the 27 states and 7 UTs.
• With a turnout of over 15 lakh from cities, small towns and villages, the melas have enabled lakhs to open new bank accounts as well as create new Aadhaar cards.

• Rs.258 crore of prize money won by 16 lakh winners, including customers and merchants belonging to different corners of the country and from varied walks of life.
• The lucky winners of the Mega Draw felicitated by the Prime Minister in Nagpur.