After multiple disruptions in the UPI payment system recently, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has stepped in to address concerns and lay out a roadmap for improvement. During a high-level review meeting, Sitharaman urged stakeholders to work together to strengthen the infrastructure and ensure the reliability of UPI. She has set an ambitious target of enabling one billion daily UPI transactions within the next two to three years.

The meeting came after users across India faced failed UPI transactions on March 26, April 2, and April 12 – marking three outages in just over two weeks. These disruptions raised alarms about the growing strain on India’s most popular digital payment system.

Sitharaman directed the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to focus on improving UPI’s reliability, expanding its global presence, and boosting cybersecurity measures. The goal is to prevent such failures in the future and maintain user confidence in digital payments. The Finance Ministry, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), stated that Sitharaman has called for collective efforts to plug infrastructure gaps and improve the end-user experience.

India’s UPI system has seen exponential growth over the years. From 2019-20 to 2024-25, UPI transactions have grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 72 per cent. In the last three years, 26 crore new users and 5.5 crore merchants have joined the platform, pushing the number of annually active users to 45 crore. In 2024-25 alone, UPI clocked transactions worth Rs 261 lakh crore, a 30 per cent jump in value, and processed 18,586 crore transactions, marking a 42 per cent rise in volume.