COVID-19 impact | ATMs lose, payments banks gain

Curiously, digital payment transactions fell to 2.36 billion in April, compared to 3 billion in March

Moneycontrol News

June 16, 2020 / 10:08 IST

ATM (Representative Image)

The fear of contracting COVID-19 through high-traffic automated teller machines (ATMs) has pushed people towards alternate payment options to complete purchases.

Increasingly people are leaning towards Aadhaar-enabled Payment System (AePS) and point of sale (PoS) terminals to withdraw cash, data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) suggests.

In April, ATM withdrawals plunged 47 percent to 286 million compared to March, while AePS transactions more than doubled to 87 million, and PoS terminal withdrawals jumped 21 percent to 4 million.

Besides this, housing societies have also arranged for doorstep cash withdrawals – which has decreased footfall at ATMs, Mint reported.

The data further showed that AePS transactions jumped in conjunction to the Centre’s direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman – this means a large number of bank accounts conducting such transactions were Jan Dhan ones, it added.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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