{"id":1038900,"date":"2026-09-26T09:56:26","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T04:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=1038900"},"modified":"2026-09-26T10:07:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T04:37:45","slug":"absolutely-baseless-sitharaman-rejects-foreign-influence-claim-over-upi-mdr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2026\/09\/26\/absolutely-baseless-sitharaman-rejects-foreign-influence-claim-over-upi-mdr\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Absolutely baseless\u2019: Sitharaman rejects foreign influence claim over UPI MDR"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has dismissed as \u2018absolutely baseless\u2019 claims from the opposition that the choice to impose a 0.4 per cent Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on certain UPI transactions exceeding Rs 2,000 was made due to outside influence, asserting it was a decision made professionally within the payment ecosystem. <\/p>\n<p>Sitharaman stated that the choice was entirely professional and made collaboratively by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), payment banks, and merchant banks, rather than being enforced by the government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has dismissed as \u2018absolutely baseless\u2019 claims from the opposition that the choice to impose a 0.4 per cent Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on certain UPI transactions exceeding Rs 2,000 was made due to outside influence, asserting it was a decision made professionally within the payment ecosystem. Sitharaman stated that the choice was entirely professional and made collaboratively by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), payment banks, and merchant banks, rather than being enforced by the government.<\/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":[91,4,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1038900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-2-the-tribune","category-newspapers","category-the-tribune"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038900","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=1038900"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1038948,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038900\/revisions\/1038948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1038900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1038900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1038900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}