India’s direct cash transfer system is an incredibly advanced architecture, according to the creators of India Stack inventions like Aadhaar and also the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). This was in reply to a tweet that explained how difficult it is to send money to German citizens since verifying their bank balances and tax information takes 18 months.
To put that in perspective, since 2013, India has transferred over 24.8 lakh crore via Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) mechanism, including 6.3 lakh crore in FY 2021-22 only. Daily DBT transaction volumes averaged around 90 lakh (in FY 2021-22).
More than 8,840 billion digital payment transactions were processed in the fiscal year 2021-22, while almost 3,300 billion were processed in the fiscal year 2022-23. (up to July). There were around 28.4 billion digital transactions daily.
The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a system that integrates various banking functions, seamless fund routing, and merchant payments into a single mobile application (of any participating bank).
Additionally, it accommodates collect requests made between peers, which can be paid for at a time and date that best suits both parties.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s Minister of State for Electronics and IT, told that the country is in the forefront of implementing cutting-edge technological solutions to enhance the lives of its citizens and the efficiency of its government.
He claimed that other countries now look to India for inspiration because of the success of the India Stack and other similar digital government initiatives. “Digital leads India and India leads digital,” he said.
The Indian direct cash transfer system is highly developed, interoperable across all banks, totally digital, inexpensive, and serves over 650 million people, according to a tweet by Pramod Varma, who is widely regarded as one of the architects of Aadhaar & UPI.
He said that it operates on the back of digital identity, a unified national payments switch with open APIs, as well as a vast network of cash-in/out touch points.
On Thursday, Christian Odendahl, the European Economics Editor of The Economist, tweeted, “Absolutely remarkable. The German state is incapable of transferring money to its citizens because … matching bank and tax IDs takes 18 months, and the admin can only handle 100k transfers a day anyway. Merkel’s devastating legacy, No. 2314.”
