To aid visually impaired persons in identifying Indian currency notes, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has proposed to come out with a mobile application.
With this initiative around 80 lakh visually impaired persons are likely to be benefited.
Besides Re 1 notes issued by the Government of India, banknotes in the denominations of Rs 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 and 2,000 are in presently circulation.
For helping the visually challenged in identification of denomination of banknotes, Intaglio printing based identification marks are present in notes of Rs 100 and above.
The central bank has solicited bids from technology firms for developing the mobile application.
The request for proposal issued by the central bank stated that, “The application should be able to identify denomination of legal tender banknotes of Mahatma Gandhi Series and Mahatma Gandhi new series by capturing the image of the notes placed in front of mobile camera or scrolled across it.”
Also, the mobile application should have an added feature to be searchable via voice option in all app stores, it said.
The RBI said that the mobile application should be able to identify the bank note denomination in 2 seconds or less and should also work in offline mode as well.
The mobile application which is expected to support Hindi and English languages, should also provide multi-lingual support as well as audio notifications, the RBI stated.
