The state-owned Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has crossed Rs 1 Lakh crore mark in transactions values for 2021-22.
According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI recorded transactions worth Rs 83.45 lakh Crore in 2021-22, Rs 504 crore transactions alone in March. It recorded a surge of 7.5 per cent from the previous month, with a transaction value of a record Rs8.88 lakh crore as of March 29.
Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, tweeted, “UPI crossed the 500-crore mark in volumes for the first time in March. As per NPCI’s data, 504 crore transactions were recorded by March 29 itself.”
As per the report, UPI’s significant rise in transactions is driven by pandemic induced lockdowns leveraging a widespread adoption of digital payments in the last two years. Hence, it has broken many records and now is moving closer to registering a monthly record value of Rs 9 lakh crore.
Minister of Commerce and Industry, Piyush Goyal, tweeted, “Thumbs Up for Digital Transactions: A watershed moment for the UPI as it zooms past the $1-trillion mark in digital transaction value in FY22.”
It is to be noted that UPI had recorded around 260 crore transactions valued at Rs 4.93 lakh crore in April 2021. Since then, the monthly transaction volumes have increased to 94 per cent and transaction values by 80 per cent marking a consistent growth.
Moreover, the state-owned payment mode has seen a remarkable increase in total retail payments in the country. It has been noted that 60 per cent of volumes of India’s retail payments came from UPI in 2021-22.
Around 50 per cent of UPI transactions are up to Rs 200, and 75 per cent of the total volume of retail transactions (including cash) in India are below Rs 100 in value.
As a result, the Reserve bank of India (RBI) had directed the NCPI to launch UPI for feature phones and offline transactions for small-value payments to further rise in the growth trajectory.
