• Union Communication Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw has announced that the UPI and Rupay card services will be available in France soon.

• It will give a huge boost to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Rupay cards.

• The overseas branch of India’s National Payments Corporation (NPCI) has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with France’s Lyra Network for the acceptance of UPI and Rupay in the country.

• So far, countries such as Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Bhutan, and Nepal have adopted India’s UPI payment system.

• Former Supreme Court judge Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai has been chosen as the next head of the Press Council of India (PCI).

• She recently served as the chairman of the Delimitation Commission on Jammu and Kashmir, which was established to redesign the Union Territory’s assembly constituencies.

• The Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) has organized an eight-day long mango festival in Bahrain to boost the export of Mangoes.

• 34 varieties of mangoes from eastern states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha, are being displayed at eight different locations of Bahrain’s Al Jazira group supermarket.

• According to the RBI, the Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) scheme had deployed more than 4.11 lakh PoS, mobile PoS, and other physical devices across the country as of April 30, 2022.

• The scheme also had deployed 1,14,05,116 digital devices, including interoperable QR code-based payments such as UPI QR and Bharat QR.

• The Payments Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) Scheme was announced by the Reserve Bank on January 5, 2021.

• Objective: To encourage deployment of Points of Sale (PoS) infrastructure (both physical and digital modes) in tier-3 to tier-6 centres and north eastern states.

• Fino Payments Bank has partnered with Go Digit General Insurance Limited to offer shop insurance policy to small and medium business owners.

• Fino is associated with Go Digit as a corporate agent.

• This tie-up will allow small and medium businesses to avail the benefits of Digit's My Business Policy in case of any adverse event.

• The policy will be valid for one year.

• This policy will also cover loss or damage to the inventory or stock due to burglary, earthquake, fire, lightning, storm, flood, riots, among others.

• The policy will also include in-built coverages like money in safe, money in transit, etc.

• ICICI Bank has partnered with ZestMoney to expand its ‘Cardless EMI’ facility for purchases at retail and e-commerce platforms.

• The partnership enhances the affordability of millions of customers of the bank who can use pre-approved cardless credit to instantly buy products/ services using ZestMoney and take care of the cost into EMIs.

• Customers can convert transactions up to Rs 10 lakh into EMIs by simply putting their registered mobile number, PAN and OTP.

• Fintech startup XPay.Life, India’s 1st blockchain-enabled transaction framework, launched its UPI services targeted at rural India.

• aim: to make financial facilities accessible for people in rural areas.

• The launch of its UPI services is expected to benefit XPay.Life’s 4 mn consumers across more than 15 states and 1 lakh villages.

• XPay.Life along with NABARD, NPCI and the state govt working towards strengthening DB and payments by enabling the last mile link.

• OmniCard became the 1st RBI licensed PPI to launch cash withdrawal using a RuPay-powered card from any ATMs across the country.

• The move came in after RBI permitted the non-bank licensed entities to enable cash withdrawals from the digital wallets.

• OmniCard users can withdraw cash from any ATM at their convenience with full security from frauds like card theft, card cloning, and PIN skimming.

• The company is working with NPCI to enable the facility.

• Retail inflation based on the Consumer Price Index eased to 7.04 percent in May from 7.79 per cent in April this year.

• As per the MoSPI data released, inflation slipped mainly due to easing prices in ‘Food & Beverages’ and ‘Fuel & light’ sections.

• As the Food and Beverages have a weightage of more than 54% in CPI, the dip in food prices contributed the most to the ease in inflation.

• Rural inflation lowered to 7.01% in May as compared to 8.38% in April.

• As per the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2020-21 (July-June), the unemployment rate of India has declined to 4.2%in 2020-21 (July-June).

• The survey was released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme.

• The labour force participation rate has been raised to 41.6%.

• The unemployment rate was 4.8% and the labour force participation rate was 40.1% in 2019-20.

• The PLFS provides quarterly updates for urban areas and an annual report for urban and rural areas.