India aims to transform its Unified Payments Interface from a domestic payment system into an influential instrument of digital statecraft, exporting its open infrastructure model to over eight countries and deepening strategic ties across the Global South.
India is moving to turn Unified Payments Interface from a domestic payments tool into a wider instrument of digital statecraft. That shift comes as Parliament has cleared a bill that would allow banks and payment operators to levy charges on UPI and RuPay transactions, although the government has said consumers will not pay and only larger merchants would face a nominal fee. The timing is notable: UPI has grown from a local convenience into one of the world’s most widely used fast-payment systems, and the government is now pairing that success with a broader diplomatic push around digital public infrastructure.
According to the Indian government, UPI has already been launched in more than eight countries, including the UAE, Singapore, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, France, Mauritius and Qatar. In February 2026, New Delhi also signed memorandums of understanding and agreements with 23 countries to deepen cooperation on digital public infrastructure, covering digital identity, payments, data exchange and public service delivery. That widening network suggests India is no longer just exporting a payment app; it is exporting a model.
The logic behind that model is portability. UPI was designed by the National Payments Corporation of India under Reserve Bank of India oversight to solve a domestic problem: a vast, cash-heavy economy with many banks and fragmented systems. Its open, interoperable design made it easier to scale at home and, later, to adapt abroad. India has since used three different approaches: linking payment systems where partners already have their own rails, helping countries build their own infrastructure and sharing open protocols so others can create compatible systems independently.
That evolution has important strategic implications. By promoting digital public infrastructure rather than only bilateral payment corridors, India can bypass the limits of one-off technical tie-ups and frame its offer as a sovereign-capacity package for developing countries. The result is a new kind of influence built less on market coercion than on utility: countries can adopt the architecture, keep ownership of the system and avoid the cost of building from scratch. In that sense, UPI has become part of India’s wider claim to leadership in the Global South, alongside trade, credit and identity systems.
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