Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday said India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has seen an extraordinary surge over the past decade, with transaction volumes rising by around 13,000 times since 2016-17.
Speaking at an event in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, she said UPI now records more than 2,400 crore transactions every month, with daily volumes nearing 80 crore. She described UPI as the world’s largest real-time payments system.
Sitharaman added that the platform is also enabling users to access financial products such as credit, insurance and investment opportunities.
The minister highlighted the role of data centres in the digital era, calling them a “secure vault” for the economy. She noted that the government granted infrastructure status to data centres in 2022 and announced tax exemptions in the 2026-27 Union Budget for foreign firms offering global cloud services from data centres located in India.
The remarks came as Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a new Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data centre and a cyber security training institution in Odisha. Sitharaman said the new facility would strengthen RBI’s domestic capabilities for payments infrastructure, with key systems such as RTGS and NEFT to operate from the centre.
