NEW DELHI, Aug 25: On completion of a decade of the Unified Payments Interface, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday hailed it as a major turning point in India’s digital payment journey and said its sheer scale is something every Indian must be proud of.
The UPI was launched on August 25, 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) under the regulatory oversight of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The UPI has emerged as the backbone of India’s digital payments ecosystem and a critical driver of financial inclusion.
“A decade ago, UPI was rolled out, marking a major turning point in India’s digital payments journey. The sheer scale and reach of UPI are something every Indian must be proud of,” Modi said in a post on X.
The prime minister also asked people to share with him their UPI experience and how it impacted the life.
Over a decade of operations, the UPI has demonstrated extraordinary scale and momentum in the country. Annual transaction volume expanded from just 1.78 crore in 2016-17 to over 24,162 crore transactions in 2025-26, representing an almost 13,000 fold surge in transaction volume.
Parallelly, transaction value rose sharply from Rs 0.07 lakh crore in 2016-17 to approximately Rs 314 lakh crore in 2025-26, translating into a more than 4,000 fold increase in transaction value.
The UPI has emerged as one of the most successful pillars of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), providing an interoperable, real-time payments platform that enables seamless peer-to-peer and peer-to-merchant transactions through a single application, an official release said on Monday.
