Finance Minister gave instructions to improve UPI services after repeated disruptions
Staff Reporter
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman held a review meeting on Monday regarding the frequent problems in the UPI (Unified Payment Interface) service in the country. Finance Minister directed action to make the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system more robust, and ensure there is no repeat of the multiple disruptions experienced by users earlier this month.
The meeting was attended by senior officials of the Ministry of Finance, Reserve Bank (RBI) and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). UPI services were disrupted thrice in the last one month – on March 26, April 1 and April 12. Due to this, crores of people had to face problems in making payments.
Finance Secretary Ajay Seth, Secretary of Department of Financial Services M. Nagaraju, RBI Executive Director Vivek Deep and NPCI MD and CEO Dilip Asbe were also present in the meeting. The Finance Minister asked all the officials to remove the flaws in the UPI system quickly so that such problems do not arise in future. Also, emphasis was laid on strengthening cyber security and improving real-time monitoring.
It was told in the meeting that the trend of UPI has increased very rapidly in the last five years. The average annual growth rate of UPI has been 72% between the years 2019-20 to 2024-25. Currently, about 45 crore people are using UPI in the country. At the same time, recently 5.5 crore new shopkeepers have also joined UPI. In the last financial year 2024-25, the total value of transactions done through UPI has increased by 30% to Rs 261 lakh crore, and the number of transactions has increased by 42% to 18,586 crore.
The Finance Minister directed the officials to set a target of 1 billion (100 crore) UPI transactions every day in the coming 2-3 years. Also, work on making UPI popular internationally, adding more merchants and customers and making the platform stronger. –