If India’s digital literacy were to be mapped, it would pack quite a few surprises, with richer and more educated states lagging their less affluent counterparts in payments and banking.
Digital literacy, driven by services such as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), is higher in states like Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh compared to richer and more educated regions such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, a Moneycontrol analysis shows.
UPI transactions in India crossed the Rs 25 lakh crore mark for the first time in May 2025.
In the January–March quarter, 95.2 percent of people polled in Chhattisgarh said they knew how to carry out UPI transactions, compared with the national average of 81.4 percent, survey data released by the statistics ministry shows.
More affluent states such as Maharashtra, Kerala and Telangana are far behind. In Maharashtra, only 69.7 percent of the respondents reported knowledge of online modes of payment. The figures stood at 73.3 percent for Kerala and 73.5 percent for Telangana.
Karnataka, home to the country’s tech capital of Bengaluru, did no better. Fewer than three-fourths of respondents reported being familiar with UPI, the country’s most popular real-time payments system.
Even states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar performed better than the national average. In UP, 84.1 percent of people knew how to use UPI, while the figure was 84.8 percent in Bihar.
Women know better
The survey also shows women are more knowledgeable about digital payments than men. Eighty-four percent of the women were able to do online banking transactions using UPI compared with 79.9 percent of men.
In Bihar, the gap was wider, with 89.3 percent of women able to perform online transactions compared with 82.3 percent of men.
Bihar leads in internet usage, lower in cyber fraud compliance
Bihar reported higher rates of internet availability than Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, or Telangana.
According to the survey, 87.7 percent of households in Bihar had access to internet facilities compared with 86.3 percent in Karnataka, 84.7 percent in Maharashtra, and just 71.8 percent in Tamil Nadu.
Despite higher reported usage of UPI, awareness about cyber frauds remains low in these high-performing states. In Bihar, only 13.4 percent of respondents said they knew how to report a cybercrime compared with 25.7 percent in Karnataka and 23.4 percent in Maharashtra.
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