India has achieved a new record by crossing 10 billion UPI transactions for overRs 15,700 billion for the first time in August. This marks a remarkable milestone in India’s digital journey in the last seven years. In August, a total of 10.58 billion transactions were done digitally through UPI in the month, in a country of 135 crore people, clocking over Rs 15,760 billion (over $183 billion) in value, as per the data from the National Payments Corporation of India. There is still one day of computation to be added to the August tally.
The 10.58 billion figure is about two billion more than the total world population. This comes after India had almost touched the 10-billion mark in July as well, clocking 9.96 billion transactions through UPI. The August figure is now a nearly 61 per cent year-on-year growth from August 2022, when the country had clocked about 6.5 billion UPI transactions. The figure was only 3.5 billion transactions in August 2021, showing an almost three-times growth in two years.
The latest number of August of over 10 billion transactions is a new high in the usage of UPI, a technology that India is now offering to other nations. This is the sheer number of people scanning QR codes at the local ‘sabziwala thela’ in their neighbourhood to top coffee shops or sending money to their contacts using UPI that has been linked to their bank accounts. Over 35 countries now want to adopt India’s UPI technology to offer it to Indian visitors and expatriates abroad. Japan is among the nations that expressed interest in adopting UPI recently.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this year said experts feel that, at this rate, India’s digital wallet transactions could soon overtake cash deals. This would be a big leap from 2016 when UPI-BHIM was launched under the Narendra Modi government. Demonetisation in 2016-17 led to people adopting digital payments in a big way and shedding their habit of using cash. “This became even more evident and helpful during the Covid period between 2020 and 2022,” a top government official had told News18.
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