The Finance Ministry on Sunday called UPI services a ‘digital public good’ and asserted that the government is not considering levying charges for them, four days after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) floated a discussion paper on levying charges in payment systems, including the UPI, NEFT and IMPS.
While officials aware of the deliberations behind the central bank’s discussion paper said the idea was only to help firms providing UPI services recover their operational costs, perhaps by levying a charge as low as one or two paise per transaction, the Ministry said these concerns could be addressed through other solutions.
