India digital payments get a fillip

Bengaluru

VIJAY Shekhar Sharma's Twitter feed has come alive these past two weeks. From a roadside egg-seller in Bhopal to a soda hawker in Bangalore, the founder of Paytm has snapshots of the unusual array of merchants who ply the teeming streets of India - and are now turning to his digital payments startup for help.

Those fishmongers, vegetable vendors and rickshaw drivers count among the thousands who've signed onto India's largest digital payments service since Prime Minister Narendra Modi triggered a nationwide cash crunch when he scrapped the country's two largest note denominations.