FM Nirmala Sitharaman Calls For Action Amid Repeated UPI Outages

After a rise in UPI outages, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman asked the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to strengthen UPI's systems and avoid future disruptions. 

She made this request during a high-level meeting with UPI stakeholders, where she also stressed the aim of reaching one billion UPI transactions daily in the next 2–3 years. 

The meeting followed three major outages in recent weeks. Officials discussed improving real-time monitoring and expanding UPI’s user and merchant base.

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The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a real-time payment system created and managed by NPCI which is regulated by the RBI.

“FM Smt @nsitharaman urged all stakeholders to work collaboratively to address infrastructure gaps, enhance the end-user experience and cybersecurity architecture. The Union Finance Minister directed NPCI to reinforce UPI’s robustness and prevent future disruptions,” the finance ministry said in a post on X. 

The Finance Minister also highlighted the goal of reaching one billion UPI transactions daily within 2–3 years and stressed the need to speed up UPI’s global expansion by building systems that work across countries and increasing international payment acceptance.

During the meeting, NPCI officials told the Finance Minister that UPI added 26 crore new users and 5.5 crore new merchants between FY22 and FY25. UPI now has around 45 crore active users each year.

This meeting comes as UPI faces a series of outages, with the latest major disruption happening on April 12 due to a tech glitch — the sixth big outage in the past year.

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