India is forced to subsidize farmers to the tune of $37B JUST for urea. Governments routinely offer free bus services to women, free cash handouts to women, free electricity to farmers (who then use the power to pump out groundwater and grow paddy in areas otherwise not suitable for it). The list goes on.
A $1B subsidy to eliminate friction on the payment front is peanuts.
One of the reasons why the fee is being considered is under the pressure of other payment providers who are loosing to UPI in Indian market. Its been believed to be one of the negotiation points by the US-India trade deals
I won't be surprised. In Australia, no public transport system accepts the national payment system (EFTPOS) and instead it is either a public transport specific card or one of the 3 American rails. In NSW, there was promise of a second phase to support EFTPOS but that is hasn't happened yet.
What a fall from grace for the progenitor of Non-Aligned Movement to be bowing down to USA and hurting its own people. The Nation has been betrayed by the State.
Same reason the US is going after Pix in Brazil. The world is decoupling from the US and the US is going to try to flex against it as it continues. Dollar dominance and the “exorbitant privilege” continue to erode (with the acceleration self inflicted). Also shrinks the TAM of these private US firms to only the US versus the world.
There it is! Behind every revealed shittery and fuckery, there's one name that constantly come up. As for this example, I'll give you a clue: it's not India.
> One of the reasons why the fee is being considered is under the pressure of other payment providers who are loosing to UPI in Indian market.
Correlation is not causation. Banks have demanded this (getting rid of Zero MDR) for many years, even prior to Trump assuming office. However, it may have momemtum now due to the impending trade deal. But that's speculation either way, and the burden of proof rests with whoever is making that assertion.
What the government conceded (or gained, which could be a boring topic relatively) would make an impactful story. Unfortunately, newpapers today mostly rely on correlation rather than doing the hard work of finding someone who'll spill the beans. There's very little of Tehelka-style "Operation West End" (or "All the President's Men" for a movie equivalent) going on these days.
I assumed you were joking about this, but wow, the US indeed did demand this from both India and Brazil. Brazil rejected while India knelt and surrendered. US also demanded that India not enforce any market cap limit for UPI payment providers to prevent monopolies - and India surrendered there as well.
Unfortunately, current Modi govt is compromised due to Adani and the Epstein files. It can only hop and jump to whatever Trump orders.
I don't think adding a 0.5% surcharge to transactions over Rupees 2000 is "pound foolish". Most transactions are smaller, and someone has to pay to maintain the infrastructure. :shrug:
Also: just because money is being wasted on cause $X does not mean that there's more of it lying around to be wasted on cause $Y! You've got to draw the line somewhere!
> someone has to pay to maintain the infrastructure
Do you know what it costs to run the cash infrastructure? Maintaining physical branches, employees to handle cash, counting machines, counterfeit detectors, security personnel, armoured transport, theft risk etc. The costs of maintaining a centralised digital infrastructure pales in comparison to this. If anything you should get a discount for using digital.
> someone has to pay to maintain the infrastructure. :shrug:
Under Indian law, companies must spend 2pc of their net profit on CSR activities (corporate social responsibility). Ask banks to use that money. The Indian banking sector made a combined profit of $40B this year. 2pc of that is $800M. Close to the $1B number.
> You've got to draw the line somewhere!
Draw it in the farm sector! They do not have to pay income tax on their income, get subsidies on fertilizers, free electricity, guaranteed prices for their crops. Small farmers cannot take advantage due to average holding size, and large farmers laugh all the way to the bank!
>India is forced to subsidize farmers to the tune of $37B JUST for urea. Governments routinely offer free bus services to women, free cash handouts to women, free electricity to farmers (who then use the power to pump out groundwater and grow paddy in areas otherwise not suitable for it). The list goes on.
>A $1B subsidy to eliminate friction on the payment front is peanuts.
These are entirely independent issues.
Should India subsidize farmers like this? IDK, maybe
Should India charge fees on UPI payments? IDK, maybe
Agree. Antiquated Indian farm subsidies are the biggest impediment to sustained growth. Nothing can be done, because it'd be electoral suicide to touch them. India's holding more than 100 million tons (!) of grain due to the mandatory procurement policy. It is not merely wastage, but also an environmental disaster to keep doing this.
$1B or even $5B is nothing, given the impact UPI has had across the country.
Where do you see $1B subsidy? There is no subsidy. The system is already profitable. This will generate a new revenue stream of $1B for banks out of thin air that has no reason to exist.
India (central govt.) also doesn't tax farmers even when they've made bumper profits from their produce. The moment a political party even mentions of taxing rich farmers, their politics is over.
Basically country is going to shits purely due to votebank politics, and this is true across party lines no matter who is in power.
Indian farmer subsidization is retarded. india needs to make farming as unattractive a profession as possible. Every social ill in the subcontinent is ultimately due to the fact that the majority of the population is in farming.
India is a conservative society. Women are 50% of the vote bank. They actually vote in larger numbers compared to men in many constituencies. They manage households and are very quick to notice price increases etc. The free bus rides and cash handouts are basically a transparent attempt to buy their vote. It is what it is.
> Treat the payment backbone as a public infrastructure.
Yeah. Let banks fund this out of the 2% of NP they must use for CSR activities if they have to.
> he too subscribes to the anarcho-right political ideology of transferring wealth from the poor and the middle-class to the rich
I do not see this. In fact, he is TOO socialist. He was elected on the platform (one of them at least) of "minimum government, maximum governance" and has actually continued to expand the reach of government. The bureaucracy has not been tamed. The government continues to run businesses. Build a sovereign wealth/investment fund like Singapore if you want a share of the growth in the economy instead of running loss-making businesses for decades.
And all the centralization of decision-making. He is more of Nehru/Indira than he thinks he is.
> he too subscribes to the anarcho-right political ideology
Trump is not at all a libertarian? He's probably the least libertarian republican president in modern history. He is big government, anti-free market and anti-global markets (tariffs), pro-state intervention in industry favouring big legacy businesses (CHIPs act, auto companies, etc), and big on debt spending.
I really hope cash transactions become a little more normalised in India.
The UPI experience is built for a single audience in mind. It has changed the way people transact in India but at the same time it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along. The only route for a tourist to use UPI is via third party apps, which charge a markup for loading money (3%). But let's say you accept that as a part of travelling - the limitation of tourist wallets is that they can't be utilised for P2P payments - exactly what UPI is most used for across the country.
Alternative, since no one accepts cash anymore, is that I have to carry thick wads of cash so I can hand out exact change. That still gets you the stink eye because most vendors don't like to deal with cash anymore.
> the limitation of tourist wallets is that they can't be utilised for P2P payments - exactly what UPI is most used for across the country
Same issue in a lot of Southeast Asia. After jumping through all hoops to get the correct app, id verified and paying a hefty fee, it was still a gamble if the restaurants would have a business QR code or a personal one.
One time in Laos I was on an island that didn't have an ATM, almost no cards were accepted and I had run out of local currency. So I ended up asking for the QR code before ordering at the restaurant to make sure it would work out.
In India it's super annoying when taking autos because the drivers won't have change and in 99% of the cases they have a personal code. So I just ended up using Uber with credit card, much less hassle.
I don't know, central banks seem super afraid of money laundering somehow. But just allow me to spend $100 or what, I just want to buy a quick coffee or a fruit from a street vendor, not a Rolex.
Unfortunately, this cannot be fixed. India has a huge boner for papers, KYC, etc. The state isn't going to let you access payments and communication services without a colonoscopy.
So a country of a billion+ people should reverse its very successful digitization efforts because a handful of tourists can’t be bothered to pay a small surcharge?
Smaller, in fact, than what they pay in their own country for credit card fees.
This issue isn't the surcharge but there are still limitations to it. The commercial banks really need to do something like this themselves.
Well they do, but last time I looked you needed to physically go to a branch, but not all branches do it - yeah I'm not going to spend half a day on my trip just to pay slightly easier. It needs to be something you can sign up in the airport in 10 minutes for.
Every time I've been to India I just ended up finding an ATM (that works with my card) and carrying around massive wads of cash. I even stayed at a hotel once that couldn't take international cards.
Governments having absolute control on who can pay who and being able to easily restrict certain groups from participating in the economy is not ideal, though (of course currently tourists being the only group this applies to is not a big deal..)
>The UPI experience is built for a single audience in mind. It has changed the way people transact in India but at the same time it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along.
Indian built UPI for a single audience AKA their citizens
Some P2P is between family/friends. Or you are paying rent etc. But a lot of it is business transactions that move funds from one savings account to another because the auto driver is accepting a payment in his mother's or wife's account or something similar. There is so much friction in the banking system if you have to create a current account that this is pretty common.
The system needs to improve drastically to support the two sides instead of letting it be. Should help your use case as well if that happens
If you're worried about the markup for loading your digital wallet, what is the markup for any tourist trying to get cash from eg. Thomas Cook? I doubt any tourist could get currency at a significantly cheaper rate.
Is this a common experience now? I haven’t been there in a while, but one used to be able to use credit cards at bigger establishments and smaller vendors used to accept cash even if UPI was advertised in their shop. Rarely was anyone mad that you didn’t use UPI.
No vendor will say no to cash but having the right small change becomes a PITA in my experience but that was 3 years ago. But even the coconut guy on the corner had a QR code.
> it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along.
But the solution to this should be to simplify the tourist experience and to allow payments from foreign banks and cards. Traveling to China has a huge hassle in the late 2010s due to everyone local switching to WeChat/Alipay but it not being available for tourists, but in the last few years (I last visited in 2023), you could use WeChat/Alipay with a non-China bank card.
I mean this sounds like an edgecase, which is good tradeoff for the ~billion of people who this system is designed for.
Essentially UPI was there to stop the industrial fraud and money laundering that was going on india. I have not actually checked the efficacy of this though. The last time I checked was when modi made the largest bank note not legal tender.
That part aside it does sounds like VAT (a 20% sales tax on all purchases) but for transactions.
> it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along. The only route for a tourist to use UPI is via third party apps
An NRI account with PhonePe is good enough as someone with OCI, but even in my ancestral town and village Visa and AmEx adoption by payment processors has been high despite no real diaspora or tourism.
And there's no real point in optimizing for the kind of tourist who's going to go visit a slum like Paharganj or go to Kasol to partake in drugs.
That said, I guess it also depends on where an NRI or PIO is from as some states have better payment processor penetration than others.
But tbf, when my SO and I go to VN to visit family, it's the same story there (Momo/Zalo and cash rule Vietnam outside the tourist bubble of D1/D3/Thao Dien/Da Lat/Da Nang/Hanoi and we resort to her Vietcombank account).
Not being able to pay for things is a pretty fundamental problem even for a business traveler to Bangalore.
Last time I bit the bullet and set up Mony, which at least got me access to UPI, but it's limited mostly by government policy: you can't complete the KYC process until you've physically landed in India, can't transfer to personal accounts, fees on adding money, fees on keeping money (they charge "unused balance" fees!), etc.
> Servers have to run, transactions settled, fraud detected and the system protected against cyberattacks. For years, the government has helped compensate banks and payment firms for providing a service that has effectively been treated as public infrastructure.
Sounds like it should just be public infrastructure and the government pays to maintain it.
Governments have paid to maintain a finance system since the introduction of token money (by minting the currency as a public good; also funding policing to prevent counterfeit) so this is effectively the same.
Isn't 0.5% very competitive and basically nothing compared to taxes on the transaction?
Here in Poland we have a budding "save cash" movement. And they make some good points about freedom and privacy but are the loudest about the processing fees when mostly it's a way for smaller merchants to avoid paying taxes. Which is fine, I think they should be exempted anyway, but let's not pretend that it's the 0.5% in fees rather than the 30% in taxes.
The difference is that 0.5% on the whole payment, might in some cases be actually much more than taxes on the profit.
Or even worse, if you sell for whatever reason without profit, the tansaction fee is your loss.
People want every government service to run at a deficit and maximize the amount of pain inflicted to billionaires. They don't even need them to balance - they're just both good.
In Poland fees are capped at 0.3% for credit card, 0.2% for debit per EU. Which is why generally in the EU you don't have the insanity with credit card loyalty programs.
Only the interchange is capped. The merchant has to also cover network and processor fees. And then there are some uncapped transaction supposedly so the fee covers this risk. Comes out to 0.6-0.7% for a smaller merchant with the card present.
UPI payment has enabled tracking actual sales data and helped with tax collection. This is an intangible benefit which is likely to go away with the introduction of the fee.
Right, this has second and third order effects. I am sure this must have been brought up during the discussions and overruled for whatever reason. The bureaucrats and politicos involved are not stupid. But there is some game being played here.
Forcing people to scan a QR code to get a price and pay is a great way to charge people different prices based on whatever data you have on them. Everybody is just taking photos never knowing what the last person to take a photo was asked to pay for the same product.
0.3-0.5% is still nowhere near the rates of visa and mastercard. Does UPI offer the same level of fraud protections or is it a free for all like Zelle is here in the states? Especially if they limit to > 2000 rupees.
Hopefully they allow foreigners some track to access UPI in the future.
Most US debit cards are 0.1%. Credit cards have to give the user a 0% loan for 60 days, someone has to pay for it including debt write offs. Can't compare a debt product with a cash product.
> the system is now available in some form for payments in 11 countries outside India.
I see this often cited, but in reality it's a farce. "UPI is international" the staunch defender says, so I rebut "Yes, in one place at the Eiffel Tower... everywhere else? The French have no idea what UPI is, and your bank will charge you stupid FX fees for card payments".
Meanwhile if I'm in India, people look at me weirdly for paying with UPI yet most won't take card payments outside of tourist areas or it will get declined because foreign cards are blocked - and if you try to pay cash suddenly nobody has any change, will refuse to take the 20 rupee note they gave you yesterday, or have concerns about whether the notes you literally just withdrew from an ATM are legitimate - meaning you can end up with notes that are defacto unspendable despite being perfectly legal tender and in acceptable condition.
And as a tourist... you want UPI? There are a few ways but they're byzantine, apps locked to the Indian App Store (for tourists?), in-person KYC upon landing, very low first-payment limit, topup/signup and idle fees that push the net fee % easily into the 5-10% range.
Lets look at a perfect example... you pre-KYC on an app ahead of your trip on the one app that allows remote KYC, but you can't load money onto - first you must provide your visa, but the eVisa doesn't count they want the actual visa stamped in your passport. You land, immediately after customs you submit the picture of your visa stamp and wait an indeterminate amount of time, it could be 8 hours, or 24 or 48 or it could get rejected and you could be required to do in-person KYC (either you go to them, or they come to you within a ~5hr window... but only in the major cities).
So day 1 it's impossible to use UPI. It gets approved on day 2, you take a taxi somewhere maybe a nice restaurant, your UPI is now loaded with INR and you try to pay the driver... Your driver has a personal UPI account, you can't pay him! You only have cash... Large denomination INR notes because that's what the ATM provides, he doesn't take card and refused to admit he has change. You eat the already inflated cost and swear to only use app-based services (assuming the Taxi Mafia hasn't had them banned in your city).
You get to the resto and enjoy a meal with your friends, it's a nice place and somewhat expensive, you come to pay, the bill is reasonable and you think "I will pay with UPI", you try paying, it's a business account so should be OK! NO.... You have exceeded your first-day limit! Waiter tells you there is no card machine, and they have no change for cash...
Eventually you leave India, there's a non-trivial amount left in your tourist UPI account, you look for somewhere to withdraw it back to your card - no physical counters open at the airport, you request a withdrawal via the app... it never comes, the next month you get hit with a 500 INR inactivity fee, your visa expires and the app shuts down, next month 500 INR inactivity fee - can't make support requests through the app any more because your visa is no longer valid... Your balance slowly goes to 0 because you didn't think to spend every last rupee on your way out so it gets eaten by the system.
I say a small sub-1% fee on UPI is fine, it's great infrastructure when it works, but more needs to be done with global UPI integration. I have QR enabled payments available across maybe 10 different countries and India sticks out as being the one that's consistently an absolute pain and actively works against you.
Incredibly, WeChat Pay in China is now easy for foreigners: submit a copy of passport, link a debit account, and you can use WeChat Pay with no problems. No physical presence in China required, and the only restriction is that you can't use it abroad (i.e., at WeChat Pay stores outside of China). I've had a fully working WeChat Pay account for a couple years now, and I've never once had to do anything in-person or anything except upload my passport and Tencent made it happen.
Unfortunately Moreta disabled Thai PromptPay QR payments recently except for US KYC'd people due to some compliance dispute. There's also lbank.com but I can't confirm if they currently work in Thailand (lbank has an... interesting reputation, I can only use it via TestFlight, but works for my daily food spend needs)
Otherwise you're stuck with AliPay+ merchants (easy via Wise) or TAGTHAi which should still work but is expensive and sucks.
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I forgot about https://p2p.me - they're taking the regulatory arbitrage 'personal travel payment concierge service' approach, basically "work around the problem, not with it" as the founders realized the people making the regulations neither know nor care about on-the-ground practicalities.
Yesterday an article on tipping hit HN and this reminds me of it. When you remove barriers people spend freely. Start throwing stupid pause moments, the value doesn't match the advertised price because of x fee, y tax, z undisclosed service or an outright wall screen begging for a tip, and people slow down their purchasing. It will be interesting to see an impact here if this goes through and it could be instructive to the value prop that tips bring to industry. You may think you are externalizing a cost but maybe you are really harming sales.
...That may be about to change...
...The government has yet to decide the rate or exactly where it will apply...
...One option reportedly under discussion would target transactions above 2,000 rupees at larger merchants, leaving small businesses and low-value payments untouched. Transactions above that threshold account for only about 4% of merchant-payment volumes but roughly 67% of their value, according to brokerage firm Jefferies....
So discussions are at an early stage and an excited journalist has made a international article out of a national one. It's up to Indians to make clear what they are willing to tolerate in this consultation phase.
if everything the govt provides has to be levied a fee, what is the tax collected for? oh probably buying weapons from usa, israel, uk, france and russia?
The government has yet to decide the rate or exactly where it will apply, but proposals under discussion include a merchant discount rate (MDR) of 0.3-0.5% - a small fee paid by a business to the banks and payment companies that process its UPI payments - on larger transactions at big businesses.
The government says consumers and person-to-person UPI payments will remain free. If merchant fees are introduced, they will apply only to some transactions above a set threshold, at a nominal rate, meaning most UPI payments will remain free.
One option reportedly under discussion would target transactions above 2,000 rupees at larger merchants, leaving small businesses and low-value payments untouched. Transactions above that threshold account for only about 4% of merchant-payment volumes but roughly 67% of their value, according to brokerage firm Jefferies.
That could generate a sizeable new revenue stream - up to a billion dollars, by one estimate - for banks and payment companies while leaving the everyday smaller payment to the neighbourhood grocer effectively unchanged.
As a happy user of UPI, I think is incredible. I want it to be more resilient, from our national economic standpoint. A (small as possible) fee, judiciously applied, will hopefully create generally constructive back-pressure on the digital side of the cash economy.
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Why the oxymoron; "digital side of the cash economy"?
Zero-cost-to-consumer one-rupee instant transaction system is basically cash economy. Because, at least here in India, our so-called "informal sectors" have switched wholesale to it in Metro to Tier 2 cities. Significantly in Tier 3 cities and smaller towns. And non-uniformly across rural / village panchayat areas.
UPI, and indeed, digital transaction uptake essentially hews close to the availability of reasonably reliable grid electricity and mobile Internet connectivity and access to banking services. The abundance of low-cost UPI-capable devices is useful only if these precursors are useful.
Reasonable fee as an economy-scale tuned mass-damper.
I hope the result of applying merchant-fee-as-back-pressure, at any size of transactions, translates into a sizeable up-tick in hard cash transactions. Nations of people that want to remain sovereign and democratically-run, ought to incentivise heterogeneity of money flow mechanisms. Especially, they/we, the people, must ensure, through our democratic influence as citizens, that a sizeable portion of the/our economy is person-to-person hard cash transactions.
And this provides a measure for "is the fee punitive?". Let's say, hypothetically, India's money supply mechanism is resilient if about 75% of money supply is digital, and 25% is hard currency. Anything outside this envelope is tending towards punitive costs on the people, both as tax payers and as transaction-fee-payers. Our central bank could manage the money mix, through judiciously tuned per-transaction fee on UPI and other digital payments, not unlike managing the volume of banknotes in circulation. The digital printing press is infinite money, if the effective fee is zero (psychologically). Sometimes, you want to make the fee zero, to bring it all into balance again, but most times, you want to create some friction to keep it from becoming a nation-state level attack vector (whether self-goaled or externally inflicted).
Crypto currencies and/or CBDCs are emphatically NOT the answer for such resilience.
I'd go so far as to argue that those forms of currency undermine (pun intended) sovereign economic resilience, where "sovereign" includes the little guy as much as it does a multinational or a country.Crypto system infrastructure is brittle by design and construction. Its effective use is predicated on the magical availability of wildly complex planet-scale electrical and communication infrastructure, not to mention dedicated tending-to of fast-decaying compute hardware, by literally every single participant in the network. A USB stick of gold-brick valued crypto, buried in the backyard is not at all equivalent to a brick of solid gold buried in the backyard.
Digital money systems make top-echelon black-box corruption easy. Hard cash makes it hard.
Recent years have made it patently obvious that digital-first money flows are wide open to centrally-controlled and/or monopolistic manipulation by individuals in power.
Consider the logistics of managing USD 1M in small bills. Hell, even USD 100 bills because 1M of those is about 10 Kilograms of paper mass (or about 22 pounds for you non-SI enjoyers (why?)). Now you need a large handbag, or a cool trench coat with several large pockets.
Multiply 1M in USD 100 bills, by 1,000, for billion-dollar corruption. That is 10,000 Kg of paper bills alone [0]. Now, add to that, the industrial pallets, containers, and packing material to hold it all sensibly. Let's say 1,000 Kg for each such cash pile.
Further, add to that the real-world infrastructure and organisational capacity to construct, maintain, secure, transport, and otherwise manage the infrastructure needed to hold and deploy your USD 1Bn in hard cash. This staggeringly capital-intensive exercise is subject to economies of scale.
These facts of life make it that much harder for anybody, especially enemy nation-state actors, to physically perpetuate large-scale money-supply based corruption of the kind being increasingly perpetuated by individual people, in private and public life, because they are able to exercise state-level power over digital economies.
Furthermore, currency notes are ridiculously hard to counterfeit --- AFAIK Indian banknotes (and US ones) are among the most secure (as in transaction-trust-secure) forms of monetary exchange humans have crafted.
Printing and injecting those into an economy at scale, to launch an inflation-attack requires nation-state level capacity at multiple levels, and the geopolitical incentive to do so. And if they do, it does not remain surreptitious for long.
Co-opting money systems, especially crypto-currencies to private ends and/or a offensive economy-destabilising tools, is trivial in comparison. You don't need to launch a 51% attack on the ledger. You just need a big enough psychological spanner, delivered into everyone's infinite brainrot feeds, to make 'em believe in The One True Currency; one that benefits you personally the most, obviously...
Pennywise, pound foolish decision.
India is forced to subsidize farmers to the tune of $37B JUST for urea. Governments routinely offer free bus services to women, free cash handouts to women, free electricity to farmers (who then use the power to pump out groundwater and grow paddy in areas otherwise not suitable for it). The list goes on.
A $1B subsidy to eliminate friction on the payment front is peanuts.
One of the reasons why the fee is being considered is under the pressure of other payment providers who are loosing to UPI in Indian market. Its been believed to be one of the negotiation points by the US-India trade deals
I won't be surprised. In Australia, no public transport system accepts the national payment system (EFTPOS) and instead it is either a public transport specific card or one of the 3 American rails. In NSW, there was promise of a second phase to support EFTPOS but that is hasn't happened yet.
The American Empire is alive and well.
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What a fall from grace for the progenitor of Non-Aligned Movement to be bowing down to USA and hurting its own people. The Nation has been betrayed by the State.
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Respect to China who foresaw this and built a massive economy without using anything of US.
Brazil faces similar pressures from credit card companies via Trump. We're cutting them out of their precious profits and they don't like that.
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Same reason the US is going after Pix in Brazil. The world is decoupling from the US and the US is going to try to flex against it as it continues. Dollar dominance and the “exorbitant privilege” continue to erode (with the acceleration self inflicted). Also shrinks the TAM of these private US firms to only the US versus the world.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415854
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> US-India trade deals
There it is! Behind every revealed shittery and fuckery, there's one name that constantly come up. As for this example, I'll give you a clue: it's not India.
> One of the reasons why the fee is being considered is under the pressure of other payment providers who are loosing to UPI in Indian market.
Correlation is not causation. Banks have demanded this (getting rid of Zero MDR) for many years, even prior to Trump assuming office. However, it may have momemtum now due to the impending trade deal. But that's speculation either way, and the burden of proof rests with whoever is making that assertion.
What the government conceded (or gained, which could be a boring topic relatively) would make an impactful story. Unfortunately, newpapers today mostly rely on correlation rather than doing the hard work of finding someone who'll spill the beans. There's very little of Tehelka-style "Operation West End" (or "All the President's Men" for a movie equivalent) going on these days.
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I assumed you were joking about this, but wow, the US indeed did demand this from both India and Brazil. Brazil rejected while India knelt and surrendered. US also demanded that India not enforce any market cap limit for UPI payment providers to prevent monopolies - and India surrendered there as well.
Unfortunately, current Modi govt is compromised due to Adani and the Epstein files. It can only hop and jump to whatever Trump orders.
these mfs have no shame do they?
I don't think adding a 0.5% surcharge to transactions over Rupees 2000 is "pound foolish". Most transactions are smaller, and someone has to pay to maintain the infrastructure. :shrug:
Also: just because money is being wasted on cause $X does not mean that there's more of it lying around to be wasted on cause $Y! You've got to draw the line somewhere!
> someone has to pay to maintain the infrastructure
Do you know what it costs to run the cash infrastructure? Maintaining physical branches, employees to handle cash, counting machines, counterfeit detectors, security personnel, armoured transport, theft risk etc. The costs of maintaining a centralised digital infrastructure pales in comparison to this. If anything you should get a discount for using digital.
> someone has to pay to maintain the infrastructure. :shrug:
Under Indian law, companies must spend 2pc of their net profit on CSR activities (corporate social responsibility). Ask banks to use that money. The Indian banking sector made a combined profit of $40B this year. 2pc of that is $800M. Close to the $1B number.
> You've got to draw the line somewhere!
Draw it in the farm sector! They do not have to pay income tax on their income, get subsidies on fertilizers, free electricity, guaranteed prices for their crops. Small farmers cannot take advantage due to average holding size, and large farmers laugh all the way to the bank!
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While most transactions are smaller,
> Transactions above ₹2,000 account for only about 4% of total UPI transaction volume, but they make up roughly 67% of the total transaction value.
https://www.outlookbusiness.com/news/will-upi-payments-above...
>India is forced to subsidize farmers to the tune of $37B JUST for urea. Governments routinely offer free bus services to women, free cash handouts to women, free electricity to farmers (who then use the power to pump out groundwater and grow paddy in areas otherwise not suitable for it). The list goes on.
>A $1B subsidy to eliminate friction on the payment front is peanuts.
These are entirely independent issues.
Should India subsidize farmers like this? IDK, maybe
Should India charge fees on UPI payments? IDK, maybe
Agree. Antiquated Indian farm subsidies are the biggest impediment to sustained growth. Nothing can be done, because it'd be electoral suicide to touch them. India's holding more than 100 million tons (!) of grain due to the mandatory procurement policy. It is not merely wastage, but also an environmental disaster to keep doing this.
$1B or even $5B is nothing, given the impact UPI has had across the country.
Where do you see $1B subsidy? There is no subsidy. The system is already profitable. This will generate a new revenue stream of $1B for banks out of thin air that has no reason to exist.
Don't forget no income tax on "agricultural income" even if that income is millions.
India (central govt.) also doesn't tax farmers even when they've made bumper profits from their produce. The moment a political party even mentions of taxing rich farmers, their politics is over.
Basically country is going to shits purely due to votebank politics, and this is true across party lines no matter who is in power.
Do rich farmers really have enough strength in numbers to outvote other populations in India?
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How is it financially sustainable?
Indian farmer subsidization is retarded. india needs to make farming as unattractive a profession as possible. Every social ill in the subcontinent is ultimately due to the fact that the majority of the population is in farming.
Who will feed 1.5 billion people then? Being dependent on trump for corn and rice?
Bro thinks he can create more rice and wheat using `dd` command.
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Why to women?
India is a conservative society. Women are 50% of the vote bank. They actually vote in larger numbers compared to men in many constituencies. They manage households and are very quick to notice price increases etc. The free bus rides and cash handouts are basically a transparent attempt to buy their vote. It is what it is.
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This happened post COVID - to help poor. A few states did that - saw electoral gains. It is not nationwide.
There is also a misconception. It is not in all public transport. In TN state, it is on select buses - slower buses only.
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It's a bargain and exactly what governments are for. It's 70¢ per Indian. It's a payment highway and commerce is good.
edit: replied to comment was rephrased during reply.
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> Treat the payment backbone as a public infrastructure.
Yeah. Let banks fund this out of the 2% of NP they must use for CSR activities if they have to.
> he too subscribes to the anarcho-right political ideology of transferring wealth from the poor and the middle-class to the rich
I do not see this. In fact, he is TOO socialist. He was elected on the platform (one of them at least) of "minimum government, maximum governance" and has actually continued to expand the reach of government. The bureaucracy has not been tamed. The government continues to run businesses. Build a sovereign wealth/investment fund like Singapore if you want a share of the growth in the economy instead of running loss-making businesses for decades.
And all the centralization of decision-making. He is more of Nehru/Indira than he thinks he is.
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> he too subscribes to the anarcho-right political ideology
Trump is not at all a libertarian? He's probably the least libertarian republican president in modern history. He is big government, anti-free market and anti-global markets (tariffs), pro-state intervention in industry favouring big legacy businesses (CHIPs act, auto companies, etc), and big on debt spending.
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I really hope cash transactions become a little more normalised in India.
The UPI experience is built for a single audience in mind. It has changed the way people transact in India but at the same time it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along. The only route for a tourist to use UPI is via third party apps, which charge a markup for loading money (3%). But let's say you accept that as a part of travelling - the limitation of tourist wallets is that they can't be utilised for P2P payments - exactly what UPI is most used for across the country.
Alternative, since no one accepts cash anymore, is that I have to carry thick wads of cash so I can hand out exact change. That still gets you the stink eye because most vendors don't like to deal with cash anymore.
> the limitation of tourist wallets is that they can't be utilised for P2P payments - exactly what UPI is most used for across the country
Same issue in a lot of Southeast Asia. After jumping through all hoops to get the correct app, id verified and paying a hefty fee, it was still a gamble if the restaurants would have a business QR code or a personal one.
One time in Laos I was on an island that didn't have an ATM, almost no cards were accepted and I had run out of local currency. So I ended up asking for the QR code before ordering at the restaurant to make sure it would work out.
In India it's super annoying when taking autos because the drivers won't have change and in 99% of the cases they have a personal code. So I just ended up using Uber with credit card, much less hassle.
I don't know, central banks seem super afraid of money laundering somehow. But just allow me to spend $100 or what, I just want to buy a quick coffee or a fruit from a street vendor, not a Rolex.
>it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist
Unfortunately, this cannot be fixed. India has a huge boner for papers, KYC, etc. The state isn't going to let you access payments and communication services without a colonoscopy.
So a country of a billion+ people should reverse its very successful digitization efforts because a handful of tourists can’t be bothered to pay a small surcharge?
Smaller, in fact, than what they pay in their own country for credit card fees.
This issue isn't the surcharge but there are still limitations to it. The commercial banks really need to do something like this themselves.
Well they do, but last time I looked you needed to physically go to a branch, but not all branches do it - yeah I'm not going to spend half a day on my trip just to pay slightly easier. It needs to be something you can sign up in the airport in 10 minutes for.
Every time I've been to India I just ended up finding an ATM (that works with my card) and carrying around massive wads of cash. I even stayed at a hotel once that couldn't take international cards.
Governments having absolute control on who can pay who and being able to easily restrict certain groups from participating in the economy is not ideal, though (of course currently tourists being the only group this applies to is not a big deal..)
Read again, this time without whatever blinders you have on. Specifically after the "But let's say you accept that as a part of travelling..." part.
>The UPI experience is built for a single audience in mind. It has changed the way people transact in India but at the same time it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along.
Indian built UPI for a single audience AKA their citizens
Sounds like it would be easier to hope for a better UPI experience for tourists.
In 2026, you think cash could become more common instead of less? There is no way that happens unless they jack the fee up and even then…
Tourists can get prepaid UPI.
https://www.npci.org.in/blog/upi-one-world-your-digital-pass...
I think there are solutions to the UPI problem which are not whatever this is. Cash has been a huge pain point in India for a while now.
> P2P payments
Some P2P is between family/friends. Or you are paying rent etc. But a lot of it is business transactions that move funds from one savings account to another because the auto driver is accepting a payment in his mother's or wife's account or something similar. There is so much friction in the banking system if you have to create a current account that this is pretty common.
The system needs to improve drastically to support the two sides instead of letting it be. Should help your use case as well if that happens
If you're worried about the markup for loading your digital wallet, what is the markup for any tourist trying to get cash from eg. Thomas Cook? I doubt any tourist could get currency at a significantly cheaper rate.
Is this a common experience now? I haven’t been there in a while, but one used to be able to use credit cards at bigger establishments and smaller vendors used to accept cash even if UPI was advertised in their shop. Rarely was anyone mad that you didn’t use UPI.
No vendor will say no to cash but having the right small change becomes a PITA in my experience but that was 3 years ago. But even the coconut guy on the corner had a QR code.
> it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along.
But the solution to this should be to simplify the tourist experience and to allow payments from foreign banks and cards. Traveling to China has a huge hassle in the late 2010s due to everyone local switching to WeChat/Alipay but it not being available for tourists, but in the last few years (I last visited in 2023), you could use WeChat/Alipay with a non-China bank card.
> The only route for a tourist to use UPI is via third party apps, which charge a markup for loading money (3%).
Or a credit card.
UPI is not perfect but me as a white piggu tourist handling monopoly money isn't much better.
Don't visit India, problem solved.
> which charge a markup for loading money (3%).
.... the markup being what the credit card companies charge them.
I mean this sounds like an edgecase, which is good tradeoff for the ~billion of people who this system is designed for.
Essentially UPI was there to stop the industrial fraud and money laundering that was going on india. I have not actually checked the efficacy of this though. The last time I checked was when modi made the largest bank note not legal tender.
That part aside it does sounds like VAT (a 20% sales tax on all purchases) but for transactions.
It affects everyone who visits India, so it's not really an edge case. I'm sure there are plenty of towns in India that is primarily tourism-based.
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> it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along. The only route for a tourist to use UPI is via third party apps
An NRI account with PhonePe is good enough as someone with OCI, but even in my ancestral town and village Visa and AmEx adoption by payment processors has been high despite no real diaspora or tourism.
And there's no real point in optimizing for the kind of tourist who's going to go visit a slum like Paharganj or go to Kasol to partake in drugs.
That said, I guess it also depends on where an NRI or PIO is from as some states have better payment processor penetration than others.
But tbf, when my SO and I go to VN to visit family, it's the same story there (Momo/Zalo and cash rule Vietnam outside the tourist bubble of D1/D3/Thao Dien/Da Lat/Da Nang/Hanoi and we resort to her Vietcombank account).
Not being able to pay for things is a pretty fundamental problem even for a business traveler to Bangalore.
Last time I bit the bullet and set up Mony, which at least got me access to UPI, but it's limited mostly by government policy: you can't complete the KYC process until you've physically landed in India, can't transfer to personal accounts, fees on adding money, fees on keeping money (they charge "unused balance" fees!), etc.
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> Servers have to run, transactions settled, fraud detected and the system protected against cyberattacks. For years, the government has helped compensate banks and payment firms for providing a service that has effectively been treated as public infrastructure.
Sounds like it should just be public infrastructure and the government pays to maintain it.
Governments have paid to maintain a finance system since the introduction of token money (by minting the currency as a public good; also funding policing to prevent counterfeit) so this is effectively the same.
Isn't 0.5% very competitive and basically nothing compared to taxes on the transaction?
Here in Poland we have a budding "save cash" movement. And they make some good points about freedom and privacy but are the loudest about the processing fees when mostly it's a way for smaller merchants to avoid paying taxes. Which is fine, I think they should be exempted anyway, but let's not pretend that it's the 0.5% in fees rather than the 30% in taxes.
The difference is that 0.5% on the whole payment, might in some cases be actually much more than taxes on the profit. Or even worse, if you sell for whatever reason without profit, the tansaction fee is your loss.
Standard VAT in Poland is 23% so taxes usually dwarf fees.
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People want every government service to run at a deficit and maximize the amount of pain inflicted to billionaires. They don't even need them to balance - they're just both good.
In Poland fees are capped at 0.3% for credit card, 0.2% for debit per EU. Which is why generally in the EU you don't have the insanity with credit card loyalty programs.
Only the interchange is capped. The merchant has to also cover network and processor fees. And then there are some uncapped transaction supposedly so the fee covers this risk. Comes out to 0.6-0.7% for a smaller merchant with the card present.
One person’s insanity is another person’s interesting puzzle and optimization problem.
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UPI payment has enabled tracking actual sales data and helped with tax collection. This is an intangible benefit which is likely to go away with the introduction of the fee.
The government being able to monitor and control how every individual spends money is a double-edged sword though
Right, this has second and third order effects. I am sure this must have been brought up during the discussions and overruled for whatever reason. The bureaucrats and politicos involved are not stupid. But there is some game being played here.
How would a fee preclude tracking sales data and collecting taxes?
Small merchant will stop taking UPI
Forcing people to scan a QR code to get a price and pay is a great way to charge people different prices based on whatever data you have on them. Everybody is just taking photos never knowing what the last person to take a photo was asked to pay for the same product.
0.3-0.5% is still nowhere near the rates of visa and mastercard. Does UPI offer the same level of fraud protections or is it a free for all like Zelle is here in the states? Especially if they limit to > 2000 rupees.
Hopefully they allow foreigners some track to access UPI in the future.
Aren't debit transactions capped at 0.2% in the EU and credit 0.3%?
No, those are caps on the interchange fees paid to the issuing bank. Card transactions have other fees as well.
in the EU, yes, but not in India with UPI ;-)
Most US debit cards are 0.1%. Credit cards have to give the user a 0% loan for 60 days, someone has to pay for it including debt write offs. Can't compare a debt product with a cash product.
Visa & MasterCards actual take is way lower than that. The fees that merchants see on cards are mostly collected by the banks - "interchange".
> Hopefully they allow foreigners some track to access UPI in the future.
https://havemony.com
Not cheap and only to business QR codes (so proper shops which probably will take credit card anyway), but it works.
> the system is now available in some form for payments in 11 countries outside India.
I see this often cited, but in reality it's a farce. "UPI is international" the staunch defender says, so I rebut "Yes, in one place at the Eiffel Tower... everywhere else? The French have no idea what UPI is, and your bank will charge you stupid FX fees for card payments".
Meanwhile if I'm in India, people look at me weirdly for paying with UPI yet most won't take card payments outside of tourist areas or it will get declined because foreign cards are blocked - and if you try to pay cash suddenly nobody has any change, will refuse to take the 20 rupee note they gave you yesterday, or have concerns about whether the notes you literally just withdrew from an ATM are legitimate - meaning you can end up with notes that are defacto unspendable despite being perfectly legal tender and in acceptable condition.
And as a tourist... you want UPI? There are a few ways but they're byzantine, apps locked to the Indian App Store (for tourists?), in-person KYC upon landing, very low first-payment limit, topup/signup and idle fees that push the net fee % easily into the 5-10% range.
Lets look at a perfect example... you pre-KYC on an app ahead of your trip on the one app that allows remote KYC, but you can't load money onto - first you must provide your visa, but the eVisa doesn't count they want the actual visa stamped in your passport. You land, immediately after customs you submit the picture of your visa stamp and wait an indeterminate amount of time, it could be 8 hours, or 24 or 48 or it could get rejected and you could be required to do in-person KYC (either you go to them, or they come to you within a ~5hr window... but only in the major cities).
So day 1 it's impossible to use UPI. It gets approved on day 2, you take a taxi somewhere maybe a nice restaurant, your UPI is now loaded with INR and you try to pay the driver... Your driver has a personal UPI account, you can't pay him! You only have cash... Large denomination INR notes because that's what the ATM provides, he doesn't take card and refused to admit he has change. You eat the already inflated cost and swear to only use app-based services (assuming the Taxi Mafia hasn't had them banned in your city).
You get to the resto and enjoy a meal with your friends, it's a nice place and somewhat expensive, you come to pay, the bill is reasonable and you think "I will pay with UPI", you try paying, it's a business account so should be OK! NO.... You have exceeded your first-day limit! Waiter tells you there is no card machine, and they have no change for cash...
Eventually you leave India, there's a non-trivial amount left in your tourist UPI account, you look for somewhere to withdraw it back to your card - no physical counters open at the airport, you request a withdrawal via the app... it never comes, the next month you get hit with a 500 INR inactivity fee, your visa expires and the app shuts down, next month 500 INR inactivity fee - can't make support requests through the app any more because your visa is no longer valid... Your balance slowly goes to 0 because you didn't think to spend every last rupee on your way out so it gets eaten by the system.
I say a small sub-1% fee on UPI is fine, it's great infrastructure when it works, but more needs to be done with global UPI integration. I have QR enabled payments available across maybe 10 different countries and India sticks out as being the one that's consistently an absolute pain and actively works against you.
Incredibly, WeChat Pay in China is now easy for foreigners: submit a copy of passport, link a debit account, and you can use WeChat Pay with no problems. No physical presence in China required, and the only restriction is that you can't use it abroad (i.e., at WeChat Pay stores outside of China). I've had a fully working WeChat Pay account for a couple years now, and I've never once had to do anything in-person or anything except upload my passport and Tencent made it happen.
Wexin diaspora ftw
> I have QR enabled payments available across maybe 10 different countries
Any experience or rec's for Thailand?
Unfortunately Moreta disabled Thai PromptPay QR payments recently except for US KYC'd people due to some compliance dispute. There's also lbank.com but I can't confirm if they currently work in Thailand (lbank has an... interesting reputation, I can only use it via TestFlight, but works for my daily food spend needs)
Otherwise you're stuck with AliPay+ merchants (easy via Wise) or TAGTHAi which should still work but is expensive and sucks.
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I forgot about https://p2p.me - they're taking the regulatory arbitrage 'personal travel payment concierge service' approach, basically "work around the problem, not with it" as the founders realized the people making the regulations neither know nor care about on-the-ground practicalities.
This is the reality.
POSIWID. Purpose of system is what it does.
If you're going to post this, please elaborate on it at least a little bit. At least to show whether you actually understand the point of the phrase.
Counterpoint: These are temporary growing pains that will be resolved in 10-ish years.
The Australian experience of allowing a transaction fee is simply that every single transaction adds the maximum amount.
After whatever maybe 15 years that have banned the practice.
Yesterday an article on tipping hit HN and this reminds me of it. When you remove barriers people spend freely. Start throwing stupid pause moments, the value doesn't match the advertised price because of x fee, y tax, z undisclosed service or an outright wall screen begging for a tip, and people slow down their purchasing. It will be interesting to see an impact here if this goes through and it could be instructive to the value prop that tips bring to industry. You may think you are externalizing a cost but maybe you are really harming sales.
So discussions are at an early stage and an excited journalist has made a international article out of a national one. It's up to Indians to make clear what they are willing to tolerate in this consultation phase.
This is very surprising because the proposed rates would equal or be higher than regulated interchange for Visa and Mastercard in Europe.
In reality it’s closer to 0.5-1% in Europe since banks apply their own fees on top of the regulated interchange rate.
I thought the regulated interchange rates for Visa and Mastercard in Europe were tiny (compared to the US).
if everything the govt provides has to be levied a fee, what is the tax collected for? oh probably buying weapons from usa, israel, uk, france and russia?
Key Points:
The government has yet to decide the rate or exactly where it will apply, but proposals under discussion include a merchant discount rate (MDR) of 0.3-0.5% - a small fee paid by a business to the banks and payment companies that process its UPI payments - on larger transactions at big businesses.
The government says consumers and person-to-person UPI payments will remain free. If merchant fees are introduced, they will apply only to some transactions above a set threshold, at a nominal rate, meaning most UPI payments will remain free.
One option reportedly under discussion would target transactions above 2,000 rupees at larger merchants, leaving small businesses and low-value payments untouched. Transactions above that threshold account for only about 4% of merchant-payment volumes but roughly 67% of their value, according to brokerage firm Jefferies.
That could generate a sizeable new revenue stream - up to a billion dollars, by one estimate - for banks and payment companies while leaving the everyday smaller payment to the neighbourhood grocer effectively unchanged.
Title is: UPI: India built the world's biggest digital payments miracle. Now comes the bill
Summary reflection:
As a happy user of UPI, I think is incredible. I want it to be more resilient, from our national economic standpoint. A (small as possible) fee, judiciously applied, will hopefully create generally constructive back-pressure on the digital side of the cash economy.
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Why the oxymoron; "digital side of the cash economy"?
Zero-cost-to-consumer one-rupee instant transaction system is basically cash economy. Because, at least here in India, our so-called "informal sectors" have switched wholesale to it in Metro to Tier 2 cities. Significantly in Tier 3 cities and smaller towns. And non-uniformly across rural / village panchayat areas.
UPI, and indeed, digital transaction uptake essentially hews close to the availability of reasonably reliable grid electricity and mobile Internet connectivity and access to banking services. The abundance of low-cost UPI-capable devices is useful only if these precursors are useful.
Reasonable fee as an economy-scale tuned mass-damper.
I hope the result of applying merchant-fee-as-back-pressure, at any size of transactions, translates into a sizeable up-tick in hard cash transactions. Nations of people that want to remain sovereign and democratically-run, ought to incentivise heterogeneity of money flow mechanisms. Especially, they/we, the people, must ensure, through our democratic influence as citizens, that a sizeable portion of the/our economy is person-to-person hard cash transactions.
And this provides a measure for "is the fee punitive?". Let's say, hypothetically, India's money supply mechanism is resilient if about 75% of money supply is digital, and 25% is hard currency. Anything outside this envelope is tending towards punitive costs on the people, both as tax payers and as transaction-fee-payers. Our central bank could manage the money mix, through judiciously tuned per-transaction fee on UPI and other digital payments, not unlike managing the volume of banknotes in circulation. The digital printing press is infinite money, if the effective fee is zero (psychologically). Sometimes, you want to make the fee zero, to bring it all into balance again, but most times, you want to create some friction to keep it from becoming a nation-state level attack vector (whether self-goaled or externally inflicted).
Crypto currencies and/or CBDCs are emphatically NOT the answer for such resilience.
I'd go so far as to argue that those forms of currency undermine (pun intended) sovereign economic resilience, where "sovereign" includes the little guy as much as it does a multinational or a country.Crypto system infrastructure is brittle by design and construction. Its effective use is predicated on the magical availability of wildly complex planet-scale electrical and communication infrastructure, not to mention dedicated tending-to of fast-decaying compute hardware, by literally every single participant in the network. A USB stick of gold-brick valued crypto, buried in the backyard is not at all equivalent to a brick of solid gold buried in the backyard.
Digital money systems make top-echelon black-box corruption easy. Hard cash makes it hard.
Recent years have made it patently obvious that digital-first money flows are wide open to centrally-controlled and/or monopolistic manipulation by individuals in power.
Consider the logistics of managing USD 1M in small bills. Hell, even USD 100 bills because 1M of those is about 10 Kilograms of paper mass (or about 22 pounds for you non-SI enjoyers (why?)). Now you need a large handbag, or a cool trench coat with several large pockets.
Multiply 1M in USD 100 bills, by 1,000, for billion-dollar corruption. That is 10,000 Kg of paper bills alone [0]. Now, add to that, the industrial pallets, containers, and packing material to hold it all sensibly. Let's say 1,000 Kg for each such cash pile.
Further, add to that the real-world infrastructure and organisational capacity to construct, maintain, secure, transport, and otherwise manage the infrastructure needed to hold and deploy your USD 1Bn in hard cash. This staggeringly capital-intensive exercise is subject to economies of scale.
These facts of life make it that much harder for anybody, especially enemy nation-state actors, to physically perpetuate large-scale money-supply based corruption of the kind being increasingly perpetuated by individual people, in private and public life, because they are able to exercise state-level power over digital economies.
Furthermore, currency notes are ridiculously hard to counterfeit --- AFAIK Indian banknotes (and US ones) are among the most secure (as in transaction-trust-secure) forms of monetary exchange humans have crafted.
Printing and injecting those into an economy at scale, to launch an inflation-attack requires nation-state level capacity at multiple levels, and the geopolitical incentive to do so. And if they do, it does not remain surreptitious for long.
Co-opting money systems, especially crypto-currencies to private ends and/or a offensive economy-destabilising tools, is trivial in comparison. You don't need to launch a 51% attack on the ledger. You just need a big enough psychological spanner, delivered into everyone's infinite brainrot feeds, to make 'em believe in The One True Currency; one that benefits you personally the most, obviously...
Obligatory XKCD: "Security" https://3d.xkcd.com/538/
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[0] More paper-napkin arithmetic: https://www.ehd.org/science_technology_largenumbers.php and https://goodcalculators.com/money-weight-calculator/ etc... (no affiliation to any of them).
(edit: fix typos, add clarifications, maybe I should have made an actual blog post... my publishing workflow isn't indieweb enough yet, sorry :'))
Ever since someone brought up this system a while ago and confused it with a Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58654740 it's a when not an if.
Cue a billion people panicking...
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Apparently even BBC reporters now use LLMs to draft their articles.
Totally understandable. No human working at BBC will ever write a neutral or positive story about India
Did we read the same article? This seemed pretty positive about UPI as a whole, while covering the expected drawbacks of adding fees.