Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman Highlights UPI's Nearly 80 Crore Daily Transactions

Key facts

• Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has emerged as the world's largest real-time payment system, processing nearly 80 crore transactions a day.
• UPI handles more than 2,400 crore transactions every month, reflecting the widespread adoption of digital payments in everyday life.
• UPI transactions have increased nearly 13,000-fold since 2016–17.
• The fintech ecosystem built around UPI is helping more people access financial services, including credit, insurance and investment products, many for the first time.
• The government granted infrastructure status to data centres in 2022, which Sitharaman described as the 'vault of the digital age'.
• The Union Budget 2026–27 announced a tax holiday for foreign companies offering global cloud services through data centres located in India.
• The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) new campus will house key payment infrastructure, including the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) and National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) systems.
• The RBI campus will also include a training institute and a dedicated research wing focused on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data centres.