UPI wallets for G20 delegates as India showcases its digital infra prowess

Ahead of the G20 Summit, scheduled to take place in the Indian capital city of New Delhi on September 9-10, the central government is pulling all stops to show the prowess of its "Digital India" initiative, especially the revolutionary Unified Payments Interface (UPI) technology. 

The government is providing an interactive experience to around 1,000 foreign delegates by giving them loaded UPI wallets. The delegates will be encouraged to use the wallet money to make payments using UPI to understand the ease, reliability and quickness of India's cashless economy.   

"Foreign delegates or participants will be given Rs 500-1,000 in their UPI wallets for doing UPI transactions,” a government official told news agency ANI, adding it has earmarked around Rs 10 lakhs ($12,000) for it.

One of the delegates who used UPI to make payments hailed the technology and said they had great experience using it. 

“I have been using the G20 UPI application…has been great. I was able to give my first transactions… Monday afternoon. Made a transaction in some small stores… we were buying cokes and chocolates and medicine actually and it's been really good…For me as coming from abroad it is a really great experience to feel included by using the UPI network," the delegate said. 

It was in 2016 that NPCI introduced the UPI system to the country. PhonePe was one of the first platforms to integrate UPI into its system. A year later, several competitors followed suit and since then, UPI has transformed into a behemoth that even foreign nations are looking to get their hands on.

The UAE, Singapore, Nepal and Bhutan have already adopted UPI, with a few more countries waiting to join the bandwagon. 

The payment infrastructure recorded a whopping 10 billion transactions in the month of August with the total value touching Rs 15.18 trillion, according to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs the real-time payments platform. 

Most Western nations have struggled to move to a cashless economy but in India, even the poorest have seamlessly adopted the novel payment system.