RBI e-mandate on recurring payments - makes no sense

On the first of every month, I receive a message "Your Project: xxx is at risk of suspension". It's not because of my credit limit. RBI e-mandate on recurring payments is the issue. It's embarrassing to see this message every month. At NeftX we use many services - international and national. Some have implemented the e-mandate rule and many have not. This economic times article explains the issues faced by otts, cloud storage and other service providers. One of the key parts of the article is:

Majority of international merchants are not going to hop on to the e-mandate solutions being offered by payment gateways, because they feel that the investment and changes they have to make to their systems post the RBI diktat is far too burdensome

A friend of mine helped me calculate this. I spend 10 minutes to go to the service provider, enter my card again, receive otp and complete the transaction. Imagine a million Indians do this every month. The amount of man hours India spends is significant. Say, you reimplement the service. In my case it took 36 hours. See the man hours lost. There are many services that can not be implemented in 36 hours.

Big players like Google and Amazon implemented the e-mandate rules. Many services we use have not. This is frustrating and we had to implement the entire service from scratch and that too in 2 days. Here is the chain reaction of this rule:

• Your plan for the day and in most cases the week is gone.
• The service we designed is not end to end tested. We need to allocate resources for this. We are a small team. This is really tough and frustrating.
• Before selecting a service, I need to first see if they have RBI mandate implemented or not. Features we need take a back seat.
• I had to change my pricing plan. My clients were complaining that entering otp is frustrating every month. I started charging my clients per year. We lost clients who prefer "pay as you go" and month-to-month payments.

Advises I received :

• Try to get a USA card. Yeah right! So on first of every month I start calling all my friends in USA and other countries, wake them in the middle of night and ask them to provide me their credit card ? Why should I ask at the first place. I have enough limit in my card.
• You should focus on your core expertise and domain only. How and when if I start developing services on my own.

My questions and opinions about this rule:

• What exactly does RBI mean by - control to the customer?
• What is this magic number - Rs. 5000 ? Can anyone tell me how they arrived at this magic number ?
• Is it not simpler to put a rule that every recurring payment collector implement a feature where customer can cancel his subscription.
• Why does RBI assume that international service providers will listen to them?

If these are not addressed, the SaaS industry in India is going to take a major hit. Startups will feel the heat. Many database services, popular email providers, and ad services have not implemented this rule. I don't blame them. Get rid of this dumb rule or get a solution!