India's UPI processes nearly 80 crore transactions daily

India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become the world's largest real-time payment system, according to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The platform now processes more than 2,400 crore transactions per month, averaging nearly 80 crore transactions every day.

Speaking at the inauguration of the Reserve Bank of India's Greenfield Data Centre and Training Institute in Khordha, Odisha, Sitharaman noted that UPI's annual transaction volume has grown approximately 13,000 times since 2016-17. She stated that this growth has fostered a fintech ecosystem providing credit, insurance, and investment opportunities to millions of new users.

The Finance Minister also highlighted the strategic importance of digital infrastructure, describing data centres as the ‘vaults of the digital age’. She noted that data centres were granted infrastructure status in 2022, and the Union Budget 2026-27 included a tax holiday for foreign companies providing global cloud services from Indian-based data centres.