Sitharaman Pushes for Stronger UPI Framework, Targets 1 Billion Daily Transactions
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman ordered immediate steps to improve the resilience of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system after several disruptions last month. Sitharaman, who chaired a high-level meeting in New Delhi with Reserve Bank of India (RBI) officials, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) officials, Finance Secretary Ajay Seth, and Department of Financial Services Secretary M Nagaraju, emphasized the necessity of taking corrective action immediately.
The conference dealt with the provisioning of continuous UPI services by increasing infrastructure reliability, scalability, and real-time monitoring capabilities. "The Finance Minister asked all stakeholders to address infrastructure gaps in a collaborative way, improve the cybersecurity architecture and build end-user trust in the system", stated the Finance Ministry in a communiqué.
The sense of urgency follows the UPI platform experiencing its fourth disruption in a span of more than two weeks on April 12. The NPCI had blamed the outages for 'intermittent technical issues'. Cumulatively, UPI experienced downtime of 282 minutes over two significant incidents—one in January 2022 for 187 minutes and another in March 2025 for 95 minutes, NPCI data revealed.
Sitharaman also set an ambitious target for the ecosystem, urging UPI to reach one billion transactions daily over the next two to three years. She underscored the importance of accelerating user and merchant onboarding to increase the platform's reach and impact.
NPCI officials told the minister that between FY22 and FY25, approximately 260 million new users and 55 million new merchants were added to the UPI ecosystem. The platform now has around 450 million annually active users.
In FY25, UPI settled transactions of about Rs 261 trillion, a 30% year-on-year value growth. Volumes also spiked with 18,586 crore transactions in the same period, which was a 42% year-on-year rise.
Having averaged 590 million transactions a day in March alone, the Finance Minister underlined the importance of maintaining growth while ensuring reliability in services.
Additionally, Sitharaman urged stakeholders to accelerate UPI’s international expansion through the development of interoperable frameworks and broaden global acceptance of the platform.
The government remains committed to fortifying UPI as a global benchmark for digital payments, ensuring a seamless and resilient experience for millions of users domestically and abroad.
