MUMBAI: The central bank’s newly established corpus of Rs 345 crore for developing payment infrastructure in rural India could ease the unit economics for key stakeholders to deploy terminals in the absence of Merchant Discount Rate (MDR). However, key stakeholders – the banks and payment companies -- would continue to demand the resumption of transaction charges albeit a discounted one, on UPI and RuPay, in the upcoming union budget. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Tuesday announced the operationalization of the Payment Investment Development Fund (PIDF) with an initial corpus of Rs 345 crore for three years – extendable up to an additional two more years.