India leads the world in real-time digital payments, says PM Modi

India leads the world in real-time digital payments by clocking almost 40 per cent of all such transactions, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Independence Day as he praised the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and the fintech sector.

Digital payments have grown in India in the last two years of the coronavirus pandemic, mainly due to the mass adoption of UPI for daily transactions. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) digital payment index (DPI), launched in January 2021, reflects this milestone.

DPI rose to 349.30 as of March 2022, compared to 304.06 in September 2021. In March 2019, the index stood at 153.47 and by September 2019 it rose to 173.49. UPI clocked 6.28 billion transactions amounting to Rs 10.62 trillion in July, a record high for India’s flagship digital payments platform since its inception in 2016.