Theoretical Framework for Digital Payments in Rural India: Integrating UTAUT and Empowerment Theory

Abstract

Indian economy is considered as one of the most promising and fast growing among all developing countries in the world. In the current global scenario, India has a number of strengths namely younger population, greater access to mobile phones, increasing technical competence and digital literacy among others. Indian government initiated a number of steps to incorporate information technology (IT) tools in public institutions to increase transparency, remove middlemen, and minimize digital divide. Digital payment is one of the prominent applications of the ICT in the past couple of years due to some of the initiatives of government of India like demonetization, and digital India. However, around 67% of Indian Population still lives in rural areas and thereby it is imperative to understand the behavioral intention to use and its continuous usage of digital payments in rural population of India. This research attempts to develop a theoretical research framework by integrating psychological empowerment theory and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to explore and understand perception of rural population towards digital payments in Indian context. Researchers using structural equation modeling or other statistical models may test the proposed research framework. In this research framework, second order of empowerment construct is proposed, which is rarely available in the extant literature. The findings of this research will be useful to government agencies, financial institutions, mobile and telecommunications operators, and researchers. This paper is a working paper and intends to further test the theoretical model proposed as the ongoing work.

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