Bhubaneswar: India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) processes nearly 80 crore transactions daily, while the newly inaugurated Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Greenfield Data Centre and Training Institute in Odisha is expected to strengthen the country’s digital infrastructure, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Sunday.
Addressing the inauguration of the RBI facility by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Khordha district, Sitharaman said UPI had emerged as the world’s largest real-time payment system, with its annual transaction volume growing around 13,000-fold since 2016-17.
The digital payments platform now handles more than 2,400 crore transactions in a single month, reflecting the scale and growing adoption of India’s digital payments infrastructure, she said.
“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,” the finance minister said.
She said the rapid expansion of UPI had helped create a vibrant fintech ecosystem, bringing credit, insurance and investment opportunities to millions of first-time users across the country.
Highlighting the growing importance of digital infrastructure, Sitharaman described data centres as the “vaults of the digital age” and said the government had taken several measures to support the sector.
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, she said.
The newly inaugurated RBI facility will house the central bank’s mission-critical systems, including the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) and National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) systems, Sitharaman said.
The campus will also house a training institute with a dedicated research wing to develop expertise in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data centres, she added.
The facility is expected to strengthen the domestic infrastructure supporting India’s financial system and digital payments network.
