No Transaction Fees on UPI Payments, Please!

The government should abandon the move to levy a transaction fee on payments made through the Unified Payment Interface (The government should abandon the move to levy a transaction fee on payments made through the Unified Payment Interface (UPI), exercising the power acquired by amending the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007. This transaction fee, called the Merchant Discount Rate, is being justified as necessary to keep the UPI ecosystem viable. It is true that the UPI payment process must be self-financing, but only trivially. The money the banks and payment aggregators (PAs) spend on keeping the UPI payment system going is more th…