The UPI remains the most visible face of India’s digital public infrastructure, and even as its year-on-year expansion slows, the platform continues to operate at a scale unmatched globally.
As on August 2025, the UPI recorded 20008.31 million transactions worth ₹2485472.91 crore, pointing out how deeply the payment system has fused into the country’s economic and social routines. This extraordinary monthly load forms the backdrop for a new assessment of India’s DPI journey released on Thursday by the Centre for Digital Public Goods (CDPG) at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB), in collaboration with Protean eGov Technologies.
Titled ‘State of DPI in India, 2025,’ the report is the first comprehensive attempt to map how the building blocks of India’s digital ecosystem such as payments, identity, data exchanges, and public platforms, have matured, where they are stagnating, and where gaps have widened. Authors of the study note that India’s DPI stack, once characterised by rapid expansion, has now entered a consolidation phase. High-usage systems like UPI and FASTag are stabilising, while platforms such as DigiLocker, ONDC, and Account Aggregator are still battling uneven adoption, regulatory friction, and capacity constraints across states.
The report highlights that the strength of India’s DPI lies not only in its scale but in its interoperability, a principle that allowed UPI, Aadhaar, and the Unified Health Interface to cut across bank systems, states, and departments. However, it warns that this interoperability cannot be taken for granted as several states continue to lag in onboarding government departments to digital workflows, resulting in fragmented user experiences and delays in service delivery.
One of the key findings is the uneven maturity of DPI across sectors. While financial DPI has achieved near-universal penetration, digital skilling, health records, education platforms, and municipal services show wide regional disparities. For instance, adoption of Aadhaar-based authentication for welfare schemes remains strong, but digital grievance systems, teacher-training platforms, and civic-services dashboards are inconsistently implemented, often depending on local administrative capacity rather than national design.
The report also points to the rising importance of trust, safety, and accountability in DPI operations. With cyber-fraud, misinformation, and privacy concerns becoming more visible, especially in payment and data-sharing ecosystems, the authors argue that India’s next phase of DPI growth must move beyond scale to focus on reliability, transparency, and predictable service quality. They recommend clearer grievance redressal frameworks, standardised protocols for data sharing, stronger public communication during system outages, and independent performance audits.
For policymakers, the study provides a roadmap for what it calls “DPI 2.0,” a shift from infrastructure creation to user-centric governance. This includes enabling smaller private players to build atop public rails, improving digital literacy in low-income communities, and ensuring state governments have the budgets and technical support to implement digital platforms uniformly. The report notes that the next stage of India’s digital transition will depend not on adding more platforms, but on ensuring that citizens can use them easily, securely, and without bureaucratic friction.
Published – December 04, 2025 11:53 pm IST
