Parliament has reopened a question that the country thought was settled: should UPI ever charge? On August 6, the Lok Sabha passed the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026, by a voice vote, and on August 10, the Rajya Sabha, since this is a Money Bill, returned it after discussion, completing the process. It now goes to the President for assent. The change reads small on paper and large in effect. It amends Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, which until now shielded UPI and RuPay debit from any charge because they were prescribed under the Income-Tax Act. That automatic shield is gone. From here, whether a payment mode stays free depends on what the government chooses to notify.

The case for charging begins, reasonably enough, with a bill nobody disputes. Running the world's largest real-time payment network is not free. Every tap that looks instant sets off authorisation, settlement, reconciliation, fraud screening, dispute handling, cloud capacity, and round-the-clock monitoring, and all of it costs money. One estimate puts the yearly cost of running UPI and RuPay debit infrastructure as high as ₹20,000 crore. As volumes keep climbing - July 2026 alone saw 2,366 crore transactions worth ₹29.9 lakh crore - that bill only grows. So the question the new law opens is fair: if security and a coming wave of AI need real investment, must UPI finally charge?

Right Problems, Wrong Solutions
The costs behind all this are not imaginary. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) chief has said AI will define UPI's next chapter, taking it from about 750 million daily transactions towards a billion, onboarding half a billion more users, and hunting the mule accounts that already run into lakhs of cases a year. Voice onboarding in many languages, models trained on financial data, and real-time fraud engines are not cheap, and all of it needs steady funding. The RBI Governor has put the question plainly: who, in the end, pays for the plumbing?

Link: https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/cash-please-the-risk-behind-making-people-pay-for-upi-11935295