Coronavirus pandemic | Sharp drop in digital payments as lockdown holds up economy

IMPS sees a 43% decline, UPI 17% and FAS Tag collections are down 90%, NPCI data shows.

Pratik Bhakta

May 01, 2020 / 17:23 IST

Digital payments have seen a big drop with the nationwide lockdown to check the spread of coronavirus bringing the economy to a standstill and putting non-essential businesses on hold across the country.

For the first time in many months, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has declined more than 17 percent to less than a billion transactions in April compared to more than 1.2 billion in March. The all-India lockdown started on March 25 and ends May 3.

Even Immediate Payment System (IMPS), a bank account-based fund transfer mechanism, slipped to 122 million transactions against more than 216 million in March, a drop of 43.5 percent.

The transaction data was released by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on May 1 through its social media channels. NPCI manages the railroads of these mechanisms.

The National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) that uses FAS Tag, which allows automated toll payments on national highways and some state highways, saw a massive fall of almost 90% to 10 million compared to more than 84 million in March.

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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