Ease e-transactions

If only the most obvious roadblocks are cleared, Nepal will be on its way to a near full digitisation of its economy.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought untold misery to Nepal. Over 12,000 people died from the virus. The national economy was decimated, and tourism came to a juddering halt. Yet even this darkest of clouds had a silver lining: The pandemic accelerated Nepal’s switch to a cashless economy. The four months of a hard lockdown in 2020, followed by many more months of limited mobility, forced even the otherwise digitally illiterate people to gradually take up online transactions, to pay for everything from daily vegetables to power bills. Digital payments shot up by 18 percent year-on-year in the final month of the fiscal year 2021-22, to hit Rs6.22 trillion. The corresponding figure for the previous fiscal was 5.26 trillion, which in turn was almost the double of the figure of Rs2.76 in the fiscal 2019-20. There have of late been more indications of digitisation. According to the Nepal Rastra Bank, the number of cheques presented at banks dropped by 8.97 percent, from 16.72 million in 2021-22 to 15.22 million in the fiscal year 2022-23. In the same period, the number of transactions done through Quick Response (QR) codes doubled.