New Delhi, 28 April (IANS). Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman held a meeting with senior officials on Monday and directed to improve UPI Infrastructure in view of incidents of disrupting payment through Unified Payment Interface (UPI).
Apart from the Finance Ministry, senior officials of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) were present in the meeting. The ministry said that various aspects of UPI ecosystem were reviewed in the meeting and its future was discussed.
It is noteworthy that UPI services have been disrupted three times in the last about a month. The first incident took place on 26 March, the second on 1 April and the third on 12 April. Due to this, people who depended on UPI for payment had to face a lot of trouble.
In this context, Finance Secretary Ajay Seth, Secretary of Financial Services Department M. Nagaraju, RBI Executive Director Vivek Deep and NPCI MD and CEO Dilip Asbe were present in the meeting to be considered important.
The Finance Minister appealed to the users to provide better experiences and to improve the infrastructure flaws with stakeholders to improve cyber security architecture. He instructed NPCI officials to increase the strength of the UPI system and take measures to prevent future obstacles.
According to the ministry, there was a discussion on the strengthening, expansion and improvement in real-time monitoring of UPI infrastructure to strengthen the trust of the user by providing uninterrupted service.
The trend of UPI is increasing in the country. Its average annual growth rate in five years from FY 2019-20 to 2024-25 was 72 percent.
NPCI officials told the Finance Minister that between 2021-22 and 2024-25, 26 crore new users became new users and 5.5 crore new merchant joined the UPI platforms. Currently about 45 crore active users use UPI.
In the financial year 2024-25 ended March 31, the price of UPI transactions increased by 30 percent to 261 lakh crore rupees and the number of transactions increased by 42 percent to 18,586 crore.
The Finance Minister asked the officials to work towards achieving the target of one billion transactions per day in the next two-three years. At the same time, he also insisted on accelerating the development of intoppered framework and increasing the global payment and accelerating the internationalization of UPI.
He said that to increase the access and impact of UPI, they should try to increase the number of users and merchants on the UPI platform.
-IANS
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