The Finance Ministry on Sunday termed UPI services a ‘digital public good’ and stated that the government is not considering levying charges for them four days after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) floated a discussion paper on imposing charges in payment systems, including the UPI, NEFT and IMPS.
The Ministry claimed that these issues could be resolved by finding alternative approaches, despite officials being aware of the discussions behind the central bank’s discussion paper claiming that the idea was only to assist firms providing UPI services to recover their operational costs, possibly by levying a charge as low as one or two paise per transaction.
According to the RBI discussion paper published earlier this month, UPI is similar to IMPS in terms of fund transfer systems, hence it might be claimed that UPI fund transfer transaction fees should be comparable to IMPS fund transfer fees.
