Everyone knows that India a very strong IT population. But few know that India has the highest number of freelancers in the world. A lot of IT professionals moonlight or work on their own, mainly on outsourced projects from the US and Europe.
The modes of payment has been via Paypal, Online bank transfer and Western Union. So far, Indian have grudgingly accepted payment via Paypal because withdrawing money can be laboriously painful experience. Until yesterday, Indian could not withdraw money directly to their Indian banks. The only option they had was to request payment via cheque and this can take anywhere from three weeks to five weeks for the payment to arrive via snail mail. Add another week for the bank processing time and you can understand the situation. Also, because the cheques are sent via normal mail, there have been instances where the mail is lost and this can get into a long drawn process of getting another cheque issued. The lesser said about this muddle, the better.
All this has changed when Ebay, Paypal’s parent company, announced that Indians can withdraw money directly to their bank accounts. Paypal says that it can take from 5 to 7 business days for the money to be transferred. Sure, its nowhere close to instant money transfer but its a definite improvement from the 25 to 30 days wait period. More importantly, no more worries about lost snail mails.
The biggest surprise was the service charge that Paypal charges. It’s a mere Rs.50 ( US$ 1.20) for amounts till Rs.7000. Even that is waived off for amounts greater than Rs.7000. This is fantastic news because earlier one had to pay around 4% as service charge. This means if I withdrew $1000, I had to pay $40 as service fee. That’s about Rs.1500 just as fees.
Another good news is that Paypal has partnered with almost all the big banks. The participating banks are State Bank of India , Bank of India, Canara Bank, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, ING VYSYA Bank, UTI Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, HSBC, and Citibank.
Courtesy:BlogNation
