From Shock to Awe: India's UPI Lessons for Europe's Digital Future

Amandeep Midha, long settled in Denmark, marvels at India's digital governance—above all, UPI's quiet revolution. He calls on Europe to take notes from this Indian story.

From Shock to Awe: India's UPI Lessons for Europe's Digital Future

Amandeep Midha

When I left India for Denmark in 2014, cash was not just prevalent, it was foundational to everyday transactions. Card payments worked unevenly, online banking felt tentative, and QR codes were more novelty than norm.

From Europe, while working as CTO at a Fintech Startup looking to build its business model on digital money in 2016, I wrote a hopeful LinkedIn article titled “Indian Great Leap to Cashless Society.” India’s digital ambitions felt promising, but still aspirational, something being discussed rather than fully experienced.

What I did not anticipate was how decisively India would move from aspiration to execution.

I had to return suddenly in December 2022 for my aunt’s funeral and encountered, quite personally, how deeply digital systems had embedded themselves into civic life. First my cousin spent time looking in her room for her Aadhaar card. And thereafter I got to know that without my own Aadhaar, now a core layer of identity, I could not formally perform her cremation in my name. It was an emotional moment, but also a revealing one. Digital infrastructure had become inseparable from governance itself.

India had not merely digitised services. It has restructured how identity, trust, and access are operationalised at scale.

In the days that followed, this transformation appeared almost mundane in its efficiency. Aadhaar enrolment, bank linking, and UPI onboarding were completed in minutes. Authentication took seconds. Compared with systems I routinely navigate in Denmark, Germany, or the United States, the experience in India felt notably streamlined and decisive. Yet the deeper shift was not visible in government offices or applications. It unfolded at street level.

At a sugarcane juice cart in Punjab, I instinctively reached for cash to pay ₹30 while others simply scanned QR codes. Groceries, flour mills, second-hand furniture, payments to kabadiwalas, all moved through UPI. This was not a targeted digital payments initiative. It was infrastructure functioning as a public utility.

By mid-2023, I encountered another everyday reality that still contrasts sharply with European norms: ten-minute grocery delivery which my Bangalore neighbour introduced to me. In Denmark, next-day delivery is considered efficient; same-day remains premium. In India,(but only in Urban India), ten minutes had become operationally normal. This reflected not just convenience, but a different tempo of daily life, enabled by real-time payments, dense logistics, and digital trust.

By August 2025, the scale reinforces what daily experience already suggests. UPI processes over 20 billion transactions each month, roughly 7,500 per second, moving close to $300 billion monthly. Developed by the National Payments Corporation of India in collaboration with Indian banks, UPI is now frequently referenced by governments and multilateral institutions as a notable example of digital public infrastructure.

The growing international recognition is understandable. UPI is not simply a payment mechanism. It functions as a governance layer implemented through technology.

A street vendor in Punjab and a technology executive in Bengaluru operate on identical payment rails near-zero cost, instant settlement, and consistent reliability. There are no differentiated access tiers or proprietary barriers. Transactions are auditable, traceable, and embedded into everyday economic life. These are outcomes that many public policy frameworks seek, but often struggle to operationalise.

This logic of digital governance extends well beyond payments. Tools like DigiLocker and UMANG quietly demonstrate how deeply India has embedded “infrastructure-first” thinking into public service delivery.

Today, I can legally drive while carrying only a digital copy of my driving licence on DigiLocker. In situations where physical documents are unavailable, I can authenticate myself using Aadhaar or PAN-linked digital records, recognised across authorities. What would still be treated as an exception or pilot in many countries is, in India, a default assumption: documents are data, not paper.

UMANG, as a unified interface for dozens of central and state services, reinforces this shift. From utility services to official records, it reduces the cognitive and administrative burden of navigating government. One app, many departments, one identity layer. The experience is not perfect, but the intent is unmistakable make the state easier to deal with, not harder.

Taken together, UPI, DigiLocker, and UMANG represent a coherent philosophy of digital governance: reduce friction, standardise access, and let inclusion emerge from usability rather than enforcement.

European approaches to payments and public services have understandably prioritised pluralism, market competition, and institutional safeguards. The result has been strong national solutions such as MobilePay in Denmark, iDEAL in the Netherlands, and Bizum in Spain, but continued fragmentation at the regional level. Cross-border initiatives like P27 illustrate both ambition and the complexity of aligning multiple markets, regulators, and incumbents.

India’s approach followed a different sequencing.

It invested first in shared rails.

It standardised interfaces before encouraging differentiation.

It treated APIs as governance tools rather than optional integrations.

This sequencing has enabled scale and speed, but it has also surfaced important tensions.

One of the most visible has been privacy, particularly around mobile numbers. UPI’s reliance on phone numbers as primary identifiers has led to unintended exposure. Peer-to-peer payments routinely reveal personal mobile numbers to strangers. Payment requests, spam, social engineering, and unsolicited contact have become familiar side-effects of an otherwise elegant system.

For many users, especially women and small merchants, this has reintroduced concerns around personal safety and data misuse, concerns that cash once quietly mitigated. While subsequent design changes and masking features have attempted to address these gaps, the episode serves as a reminder that efficiency can sometimes outrun consent, despite pressure from U.S. social media companies.

Yet even with UPI’s reach, it would be misleading to assume that inclusion is complete, or uniform. Ensuring that a MNREGA labourer in Chhattisgarh, a migrant worker moving between Nagaland, or a resident of the Nilgiri tribal belt participates seamlessly in this digital ecosystem remains a real and uneven challenge. Despite 90%+ Aadhaar coverage, rural digital literacy lags at ~50% (NSSO). If a construction work is stopped in Delhi due to GRAP4 restrictions, does the inter-state labourer employed there gets the compensation? Financial Inclusion at this level depends on far more than the existence of a bank account or a QR code. It hinges on network coverage, smartphone availability, local language interfaces, digital literacy, biometric reliability, and trust in intermediaries. 

In many such contexts, payments may be digitally enabled in theory but mediated in practice, through family members, contractors, or local agents, reintroducing forms of dependency that digital systems were meant to reduce. Financial inclusion, therefore, remains contingent, situational, and deeply shaped by local conditions.

This is not a failure of UPI as infrastructure, but a reminder that technology adoption does not move at the same pace across geographies, livelihoods, or social realities. India’s digital governance success has widened the door, but walking through it still depends on factors that lie beyond code and APIs.

Moreover, as services digitise further, financial inclusion increasingly depends on internet access, affordable devices, reliable electricity, and digital literacy. The inclusion challenge has evolved. The primary divide is no longer between the banked and unbanked, but between the connected and the unconnected.

These considerations should resonate across European institutions. As public services continue to migrate online, similar trade-offs between speed, scale, privacy, and resilience will inevitably surface. Returning to India after these many years felt like encountering a parallel administrative reality. I had once viewed India’s digital ambitions from a distance. What I encountered instead was a system that had been built, iterated, and normalised imperfectly, but decisively.

UPI illustrates a broader insight that may be useful beyond India: digital sovereignty is ultimately established through infrastructure choices, not policy declarations alone. The future of everyday payments is not speculative or abstract. It is already present, often in the simplest places, represented by a QR code at a sugarcane juice cart in Punjab. For Europe, the question is not whether this model should be replicated, but how its own digital governance choices can balance scale with privacy, efficiency with dignity, and innovation with trust.

*********

Amandeep Midha is a technologist, writer, and global speaker with over two decades of experience in digital platforms building, data streaming, and digital transformation. He has contributed thought leadership to Forbes, World Economic Forum, Horasis, and CSR Times, and actively engages in technology policy-making discussions. Based in Copenhagen, Amandeep blends deep technical expertise with a passion for social impact and storytelling.