{"id":1031019,"date":"2026-08-25T08:41:44","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T03:11:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=1031019"},"modified":"2026-08-25T08:50:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T03:20:27","slug":"10-years-of-upi-cashless-not-cash-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2026\/08\/25\/10-years-of-upi-cashless-not-cash-free\/","title":{"rendered":"10 years of UPI: Cashless, not cash-free"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A decade after the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched, it has rewired how Indians pay for everything from groceries to gold. Yet currency in circulation has hit a record Rs 41.7 lakh crore, presenting policymakers with what Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor Shirish Chandra Murmu referred to as the \u201ccash paradox\u201d: a country paying digitally like never before, while stacking up more physical currency than ever. <\/p>\n<p>The ambition was never modest. At the UPI pilot launch in April 2016, then-RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan declared: \u201cI have said the Indian banking system needed a revolution. The revolution is upon us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A decade after the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched, it has rewired how Indians pay for everything from groceries to gold. Yet currency in circulation has hit a record Rs 41.7 lakh crore, presenting policymakers with what Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor Shirish Chandra Murmu referred to as the \u201ccash paradox\u201d: a country paying digitally like never before, while stacking up more physical currency than ever. The ambition was never modest. At the UPI pilot launch in April 2016, then-RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan declared: \u201cI have said the Indian banking system needed a revolution. The revolution is upon [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1031019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-2-the-financial-express","category-newspapers","category-the-financial-express"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1031019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1031021,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031019\/revisions\/1031021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1031019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1031019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1031019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}