UPI logs phenomenal growth, other nations keen to learn from India: Panda

Several countries have shown interest to learn from Indian experience so that they could replicate the model: Financial Services Secretary Debasish Panda

Digital transactions through UPI recorded phenomenal growth during the pandemic year 2020-21 and several countries have evinced interest to learn from Indian experience so that they could replicate the model, Financial Services Secretary Debasish Panda said on Thursday.

The COVID-19 pandemic, he said, has encouraged people to use digital means for financial transactions and "the growth during the pandemic is phenomenal".

More than 22 crore UPI financial transactions worth Rs 41 lakh crore were recorded during 2020-21 when the entire world was in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Panda noted.

"We are very pleased to see that happening in our country. The UPI platform has actually transformed (financial transactions) and a lot of countries are actually coming and trying to learn from our experience so that they could actually replicate it in their countries. That's the success which we have achieved," he said at ET Financial Inclusion Summit.

Earlier this week, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman launched BHIM-UPI QR-based payments in Bhutan. This is expected to benefit more than 2,00,000 tourists from India who travel to Bhutan each year.

With this launch, Bhutan will become the first country to adopt Unified Payment Interface (UPI) standards for its QR deployment. Bhutan will also become the only country to issue and accept RuPay cards as well as BHIM-UPI.

It is to be noted that India launched an indigenously-developed RuPay Card in Bhutan in 2019 and phase two was launched in November 2020.