Amid Rising UPI Outages, FM Calls For Plugging Infra Gaps

SUMMARY

FM Sitharaman directed all stakeholders to work collaboratively to address infrastructure gaps, enhance the end-user experience and cybersecurity architecture

Sitharaman also underscored the target of achieving 100 Cr UPI transactions per day in the next two to three years

The FM called for accelerating the “internationalisation” of UPI via development of interoperable frameworks and expanding UPI’s global payment acceptance

Amid a growing spate of UPI outages, FM Nirmala Sitharaman today directed the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to “reinforce” UPI’s robustness and prevent future disruptions.

The minister gave the directions while chairing a high-level meeting with various stakeholders of the UPI ecosystem to review real-time monitoring of the digital payments infrastructure.

“FM Smt @nsitharaman urged all stakeholders to work collaboratively to address infrastructure gaps, enhance the end-user experience and cybersecurity architecture. The Union Finance Minister directed NPCI to reinforce UPI’s robustness and prevent future disruptions,” the finance ministry said in a post on X.

The meeting was attended by finance secretary Ajay Seth, financial services secretary M Nagaraju, RBI executive director Vivek Deep, NPCI CEO Dilip Asbe, among others.

Sitharaman reviewed “various aspects and the way ahead” for the UPI ecosystem. “Discussions focussed on enhancing the resilience, scalability, and real-time monitoring of the UPI infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted service delivery and strengthen user trust,” the X post read.

Meanwhile, the FM also underscored the target of achieving 100 Cr UPI transactions per day in the next two to three years. She also called for accelerating the “internationalisation” of UPI via development of interoperable frameworks and expanding UPI’s global payment acceptance network.

The FM directed the officials to intensify efforts to onboard more users and merchants on the UPI platform to broaden its reach and impact.

During the meeting, the NPCI officials informed the FM that UPI onboarded 26 Cr new users and 5.5 Cr new merchants between FY22 and FY25. As per the payments body, UPI currently boasts nearly 45 Cr annually active users.

The meeting comes at a time when UPI has witnessed a spate of outages in recent months. In what was the sixth major outage for UPI in the past year, digital transactions were impacted today due to a widespread tech glitch on April 12.

Prior to that, there was also an outage due to “increased latency” in the UPI network on April 2 and another one on March 26 due to “intermittent technical issues”.

Despite this, UPI transactions in the country continue to grow exponentially and reached a record high of 1,830 Cr in March, up 13.6% month-on-month (MoM). The payments infrastructure also clocked transactions worth INR 24.77 Lakh Cr last month, an increase of 12.8% from INR 21.96 Lakh Cr in February.