G20: India to provide hands-on UPI experience to visiting delegates

NEW DELHI: Taking India’s G20 Presidency as an opportunity to showcase the country's digital public goods to the world and its ‘Digital India’ initiative, the central government has decided to provide hands-on experiences to around 1,000 visiting foreign delegates with UPI wallets technology, besides explaining them about ease of making payments through the indigenous solution.

"Foreign delegates or participants will be given Rs 500-1,000 in their UPI wallets for doing UPI transactions,” a government official told ANI, adding it has earmarked around Rs 10 lakhs for it.

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is India’s mobile-based fast payment system, which facilitates customers to make round-the-clock payments instantly, using a Virtual Payment Address (VPA) created by the customer.

UPI payment system has become hugely popular for retail digital payments in India, and its adoption is increasing at a rapid pace.

India has emerged as one of the fastest-growing ecosystems for fintech innovation and the government and the central bank have been instrumental in driving the globalisation of India's digital payment infrastructure.

A key emphasis of the Indian government has been on ensuring that the benefits of UPI are not limited to India only, but other countries, too, benefit from it.

So far, Sri Lanka, France, UAE, and Singapore have partnered with India on emerging fintech and payment solutions.

Also, RBI had earlier this year extended Unified Payments Interface-based payments for in-bound travellers from G20 nations to make local payments while they are in India. This facility was made available in April.

India is all set to host the G20 Summit in New Delhi on September 9-10. World leaders will arrive in New Delhi to attend the G20 Summit.

The summit will be hosted at the state-of-the-art Bharat Mandapam Convention Centre at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi.

Notably, India assumed the G20 presidency on December 1 last year and about 200 meetings related to G20 were organized in 60 cities across the country. The government today also launched the ‘G20 India’ mobile app for seamless and smooth functioning with Indian and foreign delegates.

The G20 India mobile app having all member countries’ language options will help delegates access UPI and navigation facilities during the summit.