UPI overload

The time has come for setting up another not-for-profit entity on the lines of NPCI to boost competition

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With three outages in just 30 days, India's pride in the payments space—the now-ubiquitous Unified Payments Interface (UPI)—seems to be in a bit of a spot. Indeed, over the past year, there have been as many as six disruptions, an indication that the system may be stretched. While the National Payments Council of India (NPCI), which runs the system, did eventually fix the glitches, the inconvenience to users looking to transact cannot be brushed aside. The magnitude of the problem is evident from the fact that around 600 million transactions take place via UPI every day. The total number of transactions in March was 18.3 billion, a jump of nearly 14% on-year. Even if the disruption lasts just for a few hours, the toll can be significant since the average value of daily transactions is close to ₹83,000 crore. The fact is that consumers today are relying less on cash and more on mobile payments. A UPI systems failure can cause enormous problems for thousands of small vendo