Comment by sarthaksingh99

I do not know a single free payment service in the US outside Zelle and that is not really comparable to India's UPI.

Are you saying that there are services in the US that I can use to accept payments as easily as a credit card with no fees on me as a merchant?

UPI costs about $500 million per year to the Indian government while having a transaction volume of $3.4 trillion per year. That is < 0.001 % of the transaction volume.

I am not going to claim there is no subsidization to the cost to the government by the banks as they get to keep control over the flow of money and that might change in the future but for now the costs to the government vs benefit to the Indian economy is fairly clear to me.

Just the 18% GST returns on the 2.5% extra the merchants would receive when a user pays with UPI over VISA would more than make up for the cost to the government. Not to mention all the cash income that was impossible to track before is now tracked under UPI.