RBI MPC announcements: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced that cheques will now be cleared within a matter of a few hours. Governor Shaktikanta Das, during the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) announcements on Thursday said that the apex bank has made a proposal to speed up the clearance of cheques in a few hours.
Cheques are currency cleared within two working days. The new proposal has suggested the introduction of a continuous clearing system, said Das. It means cheques will be cleared within a few hours on the day of submission.
“At present, cheque clearing through Cheque Truncation System (CTS) operates in a batch processing mode and has a clearing cycle of up to two working days. It is proposed to reduce the clearing cycle by introducing continuous clearing with 'on-realisation-settlement’ in CTS. This means that cheques will be cleared within a few hours on the day of presentation. This will speed up cheque payments and benefit both the payer and the payee,” he said.
Meanwhile, Das also announced enhancing the transaction limit for tax payments through UPI from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh per transaction. “This will further ease tax payments by consumers through UPI,” he said.
Das also proposed ‘delegated payments’ in UPI that would enable an individual primary user to allow another individual secondary user to UPI transactions up to a limit from the primary user’s bank account without the need for the secondary user to have a separate bank account linked to UPI.
RBI also said that the frequency of reporting of credit information by lenders to credit information companies (CICs) has been increased to a fortnightly basis from a monthly basis currently. “Consequently, borrowers will benefit from faster updation of their credit information, especially when they repay their loans. The lenders, on their part, will be able to make better risk assessments of borrowers,” he said.