India’s UPI boom leaves women, poorer states and rural users behind

UPI has transformed payments across India, but stark regional and gender divides, along with rising fraud, are exposing the limits of the country’s cashless revolution.

India’s Unified Payments Interface has become one of the country’s most visible digital success stories, but its spread remains uneven. The payments system has transformed everyday transactions at extraordinary speed, yet adoption still tracks prosperity, geography and gender in ways that show how incomplete the shift away from cash remains. According to the lead article, richer states, urban centres and men continue to use UPI far more intensively than poorer states, rural areas and women, leaving large parts of the economy only partly connected to the digital payments boom.

The scale of that divide is striking. Between April and June 2025, Maharashtra recorded more than 6 billion UPI transactions, almost twice Karnataka’s total and ahead of Uttar Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu, the lead article said. On a per-person basis, residents of wealthier states were averaging about 13 transactions a month, compared with only around four in poorer states. The gap is not only regional but also social: although women hold more than half of India’s Jan Dhan bank accounts, they account for just a quarter of UPI users, a disparity that NDTV has also highlighted in its reporting on the payments revolution. The lead article attributed part of that imbalance to lower mobile ownership among rural women and to the continued reliance on shared devices, which limits privacy and control.

That helps explain why cash still retains a firm grip in many households and small businesses. The article quoted women who described digital payments as harder to monitor and less directly under their control, especially when earnings are routed to family members’ phones rather than to the women who earned the money. The Observer Research Foundation has argued that closing the gender gap in UPI adoption will require better digital literacy, stronger trust in the system and more targeted efforts to bring women into direct ownership of payments technology. NPCI and Women’s World Banking have already begun working on that problem, aiming to draw more rural and low-income women into the UPI ecosystem.

Fraud remains the other major drag on confidence. A survey reported by Fortune India found that more than one in five Indian families with a UPI user had experienced fraud at least once in the past three years, while many did not report it. Business Standard has separately reported that UPI-linked cases make up a majority of digital payment frauds in India, underscoring how scams have grown alongside usage. In response, the lead article says regulators and payments firms are leaning heavily on awareness campaigns and artificial intelligence tools, including real-time risk scoring, mule-account detection and voice-based support systems designed to help users in local languages. The aim is not only to stop fraud before money moves, but also to make the system easier to use for people who are not comfortable navigating screens or English-language menus.

That push is also shaping the future of BHIM, the state-backed payments app created after demonetisation and now run through NPCI BHIM Services Limited. The app has lost ground to PhonePe and Google Pay, which together dominate most UPI traffic, but it is being repositioned as both a strategic counterweight to that concentration and a more inclusive product for users left behind by the private platforms. According to the lead article, one of the most ambitious efforts under way is conversational UPI, or “Hello UPI”, which would allow payments and account management through voice commands in regional languages. In a country as linguistically varied as India, that shift could matter as much as the technology itself. If UPI’s first decade was about building scale, the next may be about making the system safer, fairer and genuinely usable for everyone.