DPI Brief — August 26, 2026

UPI turned ten yesterday. On August 25, 2016, the National Payments Corporation of India flipped the switch on what would become the world’s largest real-time payment system. A decade later, the numbers are staggering: from 21 banks at launch to 741 live banks as of July 2026, from 1.78 crore annual transactions in FY2016-17 to 24,162 crore in FY2025-26 — a nearly 13,000-fold explosion. July 2026 alone clocked 2,366 crore transactions worth ₹29.88 lakh crore, both monthly records. UPI now accounts for 84% of India’s digital payments by volume and runs in 11 countries. Prime Minister Modi called it a “major turning point in India’s digital payment journey.” The system processes an average of 66 crore transactions daily. From a technical fix for IMPS to a sovereign payment rail, UPI’s trajectory is the single most important DPI scaling story globally.

DoT Drops BIVS, Mandates e-KYC and D-KYC for Telecom Verification (L1/L7)

The Department of Telecommunications has notified the Telecommunications (User Identification) Rules, 2026, formally dropping the controversial Biometric Identity Verification System (BIVS) proposal that would have created a cross-industry shared biometric database. In its place, the rules mandate Aadhaar-based e-KYC (via UIDAI authentication) for Aadhaar holders and D-KYC (live face capture, document scans, and field/police verification) for non-Aadhaar users before issuing, updating, or disconnecting SIM cards. Separately, DoT’s Digital Intelligence Platform (DIP) went live on August 23, pulling subscriber data and photos from all operators to enforce a hard cap of nine mobile connections per person nationwide — a 10th SIM will simply be denied. The BIVS reversal is a meaningful privacy win: a centralised biometric repository accessible across sectors would have been a surveillance magnet. The D-KYC fallback for non-Aadhaar users is also notable, acknowledging that Aadhaar coverage — while vast — is not universal.

ONDC Expands Rural Market Access Through SHG Integration (L4/L5)

The Ministry of Rural Development’s National Campaign on Entrepreneurship-II, launched on World Entrepreneurs Day (August 21), explicitly integrates ONDC and GeM as digital market access channels for Self-Help Group enterprises. Community Resource Persons and Business Development Service Providers will be designated as “Udyam Sakhis” to onboard 50,000 community cadres. ONDC also ran a Traders’ Awareness & Stakeholder Meeting in Mumbai’s Malad suburb alongside its B2B procurement platform DigiDukaan, which has onboarded over 10,000 kirana stores since its February 2026 launch. Meanwhile, CNBC-TV18 profiled ONDC’s emerging role as the commerce rail for AI agent-to-agent transactions — the “when your agent meets my agent” paradigm that Beckn protocol enables. Commerce DPI is quietly moving from human-initiated purchases to machine-negotiated transactions.

GeM Marks a Decade of Public Procurement Digitalisation (L4)

The Government e-Marketplace turned ten on August 24. A PIB factsheet notes that by June 2026, GeM had processed procurement significantly above earlier milestones, with a two-day NeGD training programme on contract management held on August 17-18. The platform continues to centralise government buying — the MSMED (Amendment) Bill 2026, passed in both houses this month, further strengthens MSME procurement mandates through GeM. Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilisers’ GM publicly acknowledged GeM’s role in transforming public procurement transparency.

L2 (Payments), L1/L7 (Identity/Trust), L4 (Commerce) — covered. Layers L3, L5, L6 had no material 24-hour updates.