Mumbai, May 7: You wake up in the morning and realise it’s going to be another hair-raising day: the Boss wants that report TODAY; the wife is hollering in the kitchen; the kids are clamouring for your attention. And you have that distasteful stack of bills to pay before you head to work.

There’s the son’s college tuition fees that must be paid; the daughter’s school term fees and bus fees; her piano lesson at the school of music; his swimming classes. And then there are those mounting utility bills; taxes to pay to the local body, state and Centre; and don’t even talk about the landline, wi-fi, Internet dongle and mobile bills. And don’t forget that insurance premium.

Just the thought of trudging from one payment window to another, braving the summer heat, the traffic gridlock and the queues at the counters is enough to make one break into a sweat.

Worry no more because help may finally be at hand — and it goes by the name GIRO.

Etymologically, GIRO is derived from the Greek word gyros which means a circle. The Italians borrowed the term and used it in the sense of “circulation of money”. And then the good old Germans came and turned into a fiscal bacronym, that is, they took an existing word and retro-fitted it into an acronym. They called it the Government Internal Revenue Order, or simply GIRO.

The world moved on and the banking industry used the term to describe new and emerging payment gateways.

In its original form, GIRO is a payment instruction from one bank account to another that is initiated by the payer, and not by the payee (that is, the person who receives the money). But in its expanded form, a GIRO payment system — which the Reserve Bank of India now wants to formalise — will cover any third party payment made through any payment mode: cash, cheque, credit/debit cards, prepaid payment instruments.

Back in the old days, you handed over a cheque or a bank draft to the school, college or utility provider and the payment wasn’t made until he — the payee — presented the instrument to his bank.

Then came the electronic transfer system — called NEFT — that allowed you to transfer funds from your account to a beneficiary whose account number you possessed. But NEFT severely limited the scope of third party payments from your laptop.

Sometime ago, the RBI felt the need to develop an electronic bill payment system based on a GIRO model for payments that could be used to pay insurance premia, utility payments, taxes, school fees — the whole caboodle of payments that weigh on your overburdened shoulders.

The RBI formed a committee under its executive director G. Padmanabhan to examine the feasibility of implementation of an electronic GIRO payment system in the country.

On Tuesday, the committee came out with its report that estimates that over 30,800 million bills are generated each year in the top 20 cities in the country. Cash and cheque collections constitute over 90 per cent and electronic payments through ECS continue to be low.

The committee has proposed to create an interoperable, integrated bill payment system in the country that will:

■ offer consumers a single bill payment point, not far from their place of work or residence, which will enable payment of any bill at any place;

■ allow consumers to make payment by cash, cheque, credit/debit cards, prepaid payment instruments at the bill payment points;

■ include any bank branch, post offices, business correspondents, retail agents of aggregators, ATMs, etc

■ facilitate payment of bills through internet banking, mobile banking and IVRS

The system will be called the India Bill Payment System (IBPS). It will serve as the central payment system for management of bill payments. IBPS will receive inputs on the bill and payment details at the IBPS point.

Participants in the proposed IBPS would include billers, intermediaries or the aggregators (providing transaction processing services to the billers), banks and the IBPS points. These points could be used for payment of fees, insurance premiums, EMIs, municipal taxes, mobile top-ups, bus/train ticketing among others.

To begin with, the committee suggested that banks and other entities that are willing to provide collection services for bill payments would connect to IBPS.

The committee said the proposed system was expected to effectively meet not only usual bill payment needs but also have the flexibility to enable one-off payments and person-to-person fund transfers in the future.

The billers/businesses will not have to link separately with multiple aggregators/banks and may have a single interface. It will enable each bank to offer payment services for every biller/business without directly integrating with it.

It will seek to move the billing industry and other businesses towards standardisation of billing/payment demand systems. The proposed system will ride on existing infrastructure (cheque clearing, card payment networks, etc) to the extent possible so as to bring efficiency and quick implementation.

The committee felt that ideally a separate organisation needed to be set up to operate and manage the IBPS and the operations of the organisation should be run on commercial lines. It said the management of the organisation should be in the capable hands of professionals with an advisory body/ steering committee with representations from billers, aggregators, banks, payment networks, customers and others.