According to reports, digitizing fee payments in education has emerged as the next major opportunity for NPCI Bharat BillPay, which runs the bill payments platform Bharat Connect.

This follows last year's entry into business-to-business payments as a new vertical by Bharat Connect (formerly the Bharat Bill Payments System), which began with digitizing utility bill payments.

Over 300 million students are enrolled in the nation's 48,651 colleges and approximately 1.4 million schools, providing opportunities in this field.

The government is now pushing for a quick digitization of the education sector, which has witnessed a very gradual spike in payment digitization compared to other sectors. The requirement for central government schools to enroll in Bharat Connect last year was a huge success. They also intend to include private institutions this year.

The idea is that fee requests of all these institutes will be raised as a bill on the network and parents/students can use any consumer-facing payment application like Google Pay, PhonePe or Paytm to make these payments, according to reports.

At present, fees are paid mostly via bank branches or through institution websites that are typically not designed to handle large volumes of transactions.

“With a secure, standardised, and interoperable infrastructure, Bharat Connect is looking at simplifying institutional collections, making them more efficient and transparent while allowing the customers to use the app or website of their choice," says Noopur Chaturvedi, chief executive officer, NPCI Bharat BillPay.

According to reports, there are around 1,100 universities in the country, out of which only 30 to 40 are on the Bharat Connect network.

In contrast to other utility services, India's education system still relies heavily on manual procedures and outdated systems. Because of this, connecting them with Bharat Connect has proven to be difficult.