India has signed MoUs with 13 countries to integrate with UPI: Ashwini Vaishnaw

India has signed memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with 13 countries that want to adopt the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for digital payments, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on February 13.

Speaking to the press on the sidelines of the G20 digital economy working group meeting in Lucknow, Vaishnaw said that Singapore had already completed its UPI integration.

"All over the world, you will see that just a handful of companies have monopolised the digital ecosystem. It is only in India that we have created a system which is open and free for all," the minister said.

"Even Google then left its own payment system and adopted UPI. It also wrote to the US Fed saying that India's payment system has democratisation... A person can do any transaction from Rs 2 to Rs 2 lakh and the average payment settlement time is just 2 seconds," he added.

Payments through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) accounted for more than half of all digital transactions in India in FY22 (2021-22), suggesting rapid adoption of the technology that was launched just six years back.

In FY22, UPI accounted for 52 percent of the total 8,840 crore financial digital transactions with a total value of Rs 126 lakh crore, the government noted in its pre-Budget Economic Survey. In FY19 (2018-19), UPI accounted only for about 17 percent of the country's total 3,100 crore digital transactions, the Economic Survey noted earlier this month.

On average, between FY19-22 (calendar year), UPI transactions grew 121 percent in terms of value and 115 percent in terms of volume, the survey noted. In December 2022, UPI touched its highest-ever mark with 782 crore transactions worth  Rs 12.8 lakh crore, according to the Economic Survey.

Meanwhile, the Union Budget 2023-24 showed that the government’s financial support for the digital payments sector is expected to jump more than two-fold to Rs 2,137 crore in the current fiscal, compared to Rs 1,044 crore spent in FY22.

However, for the third year in a row, the government's budgetary allocation for this item has remained unchanged at Rs 1,500 crore for the next fiscal year (FY24).