Inside the UPI decade: How a cash-first nation learned to pay differently

UPI, handles roughly 3% of UPI’s daily volume; Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), designed for large-value transfers between banks and businesses, processes in a full day what UPI clears within minutes; and for every credit card transaction in the country, there are nearly 40 UPI payments.Each system serves a different purpose, but the comparison underscores how dramatically the centre of gravity in India’s payment landscape has shifted.This pattern demonstrates that UPI’s rise is not merely a technological upgrade; it reflects a deeper behavioural shift in how routine payment activity is conducted across the country.That success story is real, but it is also incomplete. When a single system becomes this dominant, national aggregates start to tell us less and less about what is actually happening on the ground.

Transactions keep rising, new use cases are layered on, and yet basic questions remain unresolved: Who is still outside, and why? How do those who are “inside” experience the system and where do trust, confusion or hesitation show up? These experiences matter because UPI now shapes how millions transact daily, and the system’s future choices hinge on how reliably and safely people can use it at scale.To understand how these shifts are playing out in people’s actual lives, we spent the past year speaking to UPI users, non-users and small retailers across Maharashtra and Bihar. This work, published as Understanding UPI through User Experience: Insights from the Ground by the DPI Academy (an initiative of Artha Global and the eGov Foundation), covered four districts and surveyed 3,200 users, 800 non-users and 800 merchants.