M-commerce gets a major fillip with RBI’s decision to up daily transaction limit to Rs 50,000.

Most people are not surprised with Ajay Adiseshann's regular use of his mobile handset for paying utility bills and making other purchases, like booking movie tickets. After all, Adiseshann is the founder and managing director of mobile commerce (m-commerce) company PayMate.

"With the credit limit going up, which I see as an indicator of RBI's confidence in the medium, I think, my m-commerce bills, as a consumer, might just go up," he says.

Indians have largely been wary of using their mobile devices to make high-value purchases. But the registered five million-plus m-commerce users are beginning to make their presence felt. In fact, financial services and research firm Celent claims, in 2010, nearly 35 per cent households registered for online banking will use mobile banking too. This will increase the mobile banking user base to 2 per cent from last year's 0.2 per cent.

Atom Technologies, a mobile payment service provider, understands these concerns. And, it has a good reason to. The company has over a million registered users for m-commerce services and has successfully executed transactions worth over Rs 1,000 crore. Atom's director, Dewang Neralla, says: "Even though many Indians continue to be wary of using their mobile devices to make high-value purchases, m-commerce remains the most promising mode of transaction for various reasons like security, awareness and, of course, the transaction limit."

Adiseshann, who claims his company, PayMate, has more than a million m-commerce subscribers, believes it is only a matter of time before awareness of the mobile payment channel and, subsequently, m-commerce takes off.

Of course, having a web page show up on a 3-inch LCD screen instead of a 17-inch monitor is not the best way to promote m-commerce, since users must zoom in and out and endlessly scroll to make the site's content large enough to read. Also, mobile handsets may lack the required bandwidth to download graphics or pages as quickly as a desktop.

Also, lack of interest for m-payments and m-commerce has less to do with whether the user will eventually see value in mobile services. More than that, it's the ecosystem players -- banks, telcos and m-commerce companies -- who need to proactively deliver services and an environment that can trigger the Indian mobile evolution, according to mChek CEO Sanjay Swamy.