UPI future financing requires thorough scrutiny after new fee law

In India, many people pay for things by making quick transfers from their phones using a system called UPI.

For a long time, banks and payment companies were not allowed to charge shopkeepers for taking UPI payments.

Now, a new law lets the government charge for some of these payments.

The government says normal transfers between friends and most shop payments will stay free.

But those promises are not written in the law, so nobody knows all the details yet.

UPI is used a huge amount — more than twenty-four thousand crore times in one year.

Running UPI costs money for servers, security and keeping payments safe, and government help covers only a small part of those costs.

Charging big businesses a small fee could help pay for the system.

However, shops might add the fee to their prices, making things costlier for customers.

Some people might then go back to using cash, which could slow down a payment method that helps many people.