India, March 11 -- The government may be considering bringing back merchant charges on transactions made using Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and RuPay-powered debit cards.

However, this is for large merchants whose GST-based annual turnover is over Rs.40 lakh, according to an Economic Times report.

HT.com has not independently verified the information.

These charges, also known as merchant discount rates (MDR), are paid by the merchant to the bank for processing payments in real-time.

The proposal comes on the back of the logic that the merchants with card machines are already paying MDR on debit and credit cards from Visa and Mastercard, so they can do so for UPI and RuPay debit cards too.

However, there was an MDR to be paid bef...