The India Stack, decoded one layer at a time.

After 12 billion transactions a month, what is UPI actually for?

When the National Payments Corporation of India built UPI, the brief was simple: make person-to-person transfers free, instant and inter-operable. A decade later, the rails carry loan disbursals, P2P lending, securities settlement, carbon credits and even municipal challans. We trace how an infrastructure layer quietly became an operating system — and ask whether the RBI's new risk-weight norms will slow the next phase of growth.