UPI transactions surge over 5 years; 12 countries adopt India's digital payment system

📌 Summary:

• Responding to a Lok Sabha question during the Monsoon Session, MoS Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said 55.49 crore users had been onboarded onto UPI as of June 2026

• Five-year transaction growth: FY2021-22 saw 4,595.61 crore transactions worth Rs 84.16 lakh crore; FY2022-23, 8,371.44 crore (Rs 139.15 lakh crore); FY2023-24, 13,112.95 crore (Rs 199.95 lakh crore); FY2024-25, 18,586.60 crore (Rs 260.56 lakh crore)

• FY2025-26 was the highest ever: 24,161.69 crore transactions worth Rs 314.23 lakh crore — roughly a five-fold rise in volume and nearly four-fold in value over five years

• Security and transparency measures cited: risk-based transaction limits to curb fraud, safeguards against unauthorised mobile number changes and misuse of SMS-based authentication, and enhanced security requirements for UPI applications

• NPCI has issued the Comprehensive UPI Information Security Framework (CUISF) 2025 and a Mobile Application Security Framework mandating advanced security controls

• Internationalisation is run through NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL), a wholly owned NPCI subsidiary set up in April 2020 to take UPI and RuPay to foreign markets

• Twelve country-deployments are live: Bhutan (P2M, RMA Bhutan, July 2021); Singapore (P2M, Aug 2021 and P2P via BCS PayNow, Feb 2023); UAE (P2M, April 2022); France (P2M, LYRA Network, Feb 2024); Mauritius (P2M, Bank of Mauritius, Feb 2024); Sri Lanka (P2M, LankaPay, Feb 2024); Nepal (P2M, Fonepay, March 2024 and P2P via NCHL, June 2026); Qatar (P2M, Qatar National Bank, Sept 2025); Greece (P2P, Eurobank, May 2026); Cambodia (P2M, Acleda Bank, June 2026)

• Stated benefit: seamless cross-border payments for Indian tourists and the diaspora, while helping partner countries build UPI-like real-time payment systems or RuPay-like domestic card schemes

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS3 — digital economy, financial inclusion and India's Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) as an instrument of soft power and technology diplomacy. Also GS2 (diaspora, bilateral cooperation).

📝 Prelims Facts:

• UPI was launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on April 11, 2016, under RBI regulatory supervision
• UPI is authorised under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007
• NPCI International Payments Ltd (NIPL) was set up in April 2020
• Bhutan was the first country to go live on UPI (July 2021); France was the first European country (February 2024)
• UPI users as of June 2026: 55.49 crore

🔑 Key Term: Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) — open, interoperable digital building blocks such as identity, payments and data-sharing rails, provided as public goods on which both public and private services can be built; UPI and Aadhaar are India's flagship examples.