Nearly a decade after its launch, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become the backbone of digital transactions in India. In FY 2024–25, it processed over 185 billion payments – an average of 509 million a day – accounting for more than 83% of all retail digital transactions. To put that in perspective: India’s Immediate Payment Service (IMPS), a foundational system for instant interbank transfers that also underpins UPI, handles around 3% of UPI’s daily volume; Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), used for large-value transfers between banks and businesses, processes in a full day what UPI clears in minutes; and for every credit card swipe in the country, there are nearly 40 UPI payments.
Numbers of this scale are remarkable, but they do not capture the full story. By making digital transactions simple, free, and interoperable, UPI has become the most widely used entry point into digital payments for millions of people and small businesses. Understanding its significance means looking beyond aggregate data to see how it is experienced in practice: by users making their first digital payment, by kirana shop owners managing payment records, and by institutions grappling with issues of safety and governance.
The DPI Academy has produced this flagship report as one of the first attempts to build that evidence. Based on fieldwork in selected districts of Maharashtra and Bihar with nearly 4,800 respondents, including users, non-users, and small retailers, as well as conversations with policymakers, technologists, and ecosystem actors, it captures how UPI’s promise is playing out on the ground. While the findings are drawn from a sample survey and are not nationally representative, they highlight important patterns. Among the 800 non-users we surveyed, more than half (57%) cited lack of awareness as a reason for non-use, even as smartphone users showed near-universal adoption. For merchants, UPI offered speed and convenience, alongside the benefit of digital records. At the same time, its frictionless design – a core strength of UPI has also been exploited by bad actors through social engineering scams, and when things went wrong, grievance redressal channels were often little known or unevenly used.
Seen together, these insights position UPI as a transformative digital payment rail that has expanded participation at scale. They also show how everyday experiences of access, ease, trust, and vulnerability reflect deeper questions about sustainability, safeguards, and accountability in the wider ecosystem.
By bringing people’s experiences to the surface, the report offers a grounded perspective on UPI’s evolution and raises questions relevant not only for India but also for other countries adopting or experimenting with digital payment systems as part of their Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) strategies.
