Key Highlights

  • Record Scale: UPI now processes over 2,400 crore transactions a month, or nearly 80 crore every day, FM Nirmala Sitharaman said.
  • 13,000x Growth: UPI’s annual transaction volume has grown around 13,000 times since 2016-17.
  • New RBI Facility: PM Narendra Modi inaugurated RBI’s Greenfield Data Centre and Training Institute in Khordha, Odisha.
  • Critical Systems: The campus will house RBI’s mission-critical systems, including RTGS and NEFT.
  • Data Centre Push: Data centres got infrastructure status in 2022, and Budget 2026-27 announced a tax holiday for foreign firms offering global cloud services from India.

India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become the world’s largest real-time payment system, now processing more than 2,400 crore transactions a month, or nearly 80 crore transactions every day, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Sunday.

Put simply, that works out to more than 9,000 UPI payments every second, round the clock.

The Finance Minister was speaking at the inauguration of the Reserve Bank of India’s Greenfield Data Centre and Training Institute by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Khordha, Odisha. “UPI has become the world’s largest real-time payment system. Its annual transaction volume has grown around 13,000 times since 2016–17, and it now handles over 2,400 crore transactions in a single month, or nearly 80 crore transactions every day,” she said.

Sitharaman said UPI’s rapid growth has helped build a vibrant fintech ecosystem that is bringing credit, insurance and investment opportunities to millions of first-time users across the country. “The vibrant fintech ecosystem built on these initiatives is bringing credit, insurance and investment opportunities to first-time users. A data centre is the vault of the digital age,” she said.

Why the New RBI Data Centre Matters

The Finance Minister said the new RBI facility will strengthen India’s domestic digital infrastructure and support the systems that form the backbone of the country’s payments architecture. “This campus will house the Reserve Bank’s mission-critical systems, including RTGS and NEFT. The training institute, with its own research wing, will build expertise in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data centres,” she said.

She also pointed to the government’s push for the sector, noting that data centres were granted infrastructure status in 2022, while the Union Budget 2026-27 announced a tax holiday for foreign companies providing global cloud services from data centres located in India.

The two announcements are closely linked. As everyday payments, from tea stalls to large businesses, move to UPI, the reliability and security of the systems behind them become a matter of national importance. Even a short outage at this scale can affect crores of users. Housing critical payment systems like RTGS and NEFT in a dedicated, domestic facility, and training specialists in cybersecurity and AI, signals that India is now investing as much in protecting its digital payments backbone as in expanding it. For Odisha, hosting such a facility also places the state on the map of India’s growing data centre economy.

(With inputs from IANS)