DPI Brief — September 25, 2026

The MDR fortnight enters its endgame (L2 — Payments). The 0.4% merchant fee on UPI transactions above ₹2,000, effective October 15, dominated the last 24 hours from every direction. NPCI managing director Dilip Asbe said about 10% of overall UPI transaction value could face the risk of merchants passing the charge to consumers, and that about 80% of the MDR will be collected from businesses turning over more than ₹1,000 crore a year; the ₹2,000 threshold covers only 4% of person-to-merchant volume but roughly two-thirds of P2M value. Government sources fired back that not a “single penny” of the MDR reaches the exchequer — it is shared among banks and ecosystem players — that consumers will pay nothing extra, and that the Indian Banks’ Association will run regional-language awareness campaigns. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman rejected opposition allegations outright, while the Department of Financial Services again pointed to the September 15 NPCI circular restricting UPI credit transactions to RuPay credit cards. NPCI has separately estimated the framework could recover ₹15,000 crore in its first year. Resistance is formalising on two tracks: a PIL in the Supreme Court challenges the MDR before rollout, and trader bodies have called a “No UPI Day” for October 2. RuPay debit payments stay exempt at any amount, and all P2P transfers remain free.

MeitY signals tighter AI incident reporting (L7 — Trust). The IT ministry has said it will tighten the norms, timeframe and content of incident reporting to cover incidents involving AI systems, insisting there is no reason to pause AI research in India. Ministry sources told the Economic Times that misbehaviour by AI agents already falls under the CERT-In cyber-incident directions, which mandate reporting within six hours — and that the existing framework is being reviewed as agent capabilities grow. The gap: the AI Governance Guidelines’ incident framework is voluntary and doesn’t specify who reports (developer, provider or deployer), and MeitY hasn’t said whether it will extend CERT-In’s mandatory regime or build a separate AI-incident track. For a trust layer that has so far treated AI harms as an afterthought to cybersecurity, converting that ambiguity into hard rules — with a clock attached — is the story to watch this quarter.

DigiLocker gets an agentic AI front door (L3 — Documents). On September 23, MeitY shortlisted CoRover and Kyndryl to build a reusable agentic AI platform, with DigiLocker as the first implementation. The NeGD concept note reportedly names LangGraph and CrewAI for orchestration, and bakes in the guardrails that matter: explicit citizen consent capture, allow-listed APIs, human-in-the-loop checkpoints for irreversible actions, full audit trails, and multilingual flows. The design question is exactly the one this desk keeps asking of agentic government: an assistant that can “ask, do and escalate” against a national document vault needs consent and audit architecture before it needs fluency. Watch for the formal work order, the pilot bot’s go-live window, and which ministries adopt the reusable framework through NICSI empanelment.

Haryana builds its AgriStack bench (L5 — Sectoral). Haryana will establish a dedicated AgriStack Cell and receive central incentives of up to ₹216 crore for completing farmer registration, plus ₹50 crore for running digital crop surveys across more than 80% of its villages. The state-level machinery is the interesting part: a standing cell, district and block committees, and a project management unit turn AgriStack from a survey exercise into permanent administrative infrastructure. Nationally, the farmers registry has crossed 9.2 crore Farmer IDs, and states are already routing real money through it — Maharashtra moved over ₹14,000 crore in crop-loss relief to 89 lakh farmers in five days using AgriStack rails. Farmer ID + digital crop survey is quietly becoming the eligibility backbone for credit, insurance and procurement.

Special Campaign 6.0’s preparatory window closes this week (L6 — Governance). DARPG’s Special Campaign 6.0 — the annual swachhata-and-pendency drive across central ministries — launched its web portal on September 16, with the preparatory phase running September 16–30 and implementation from October 2–31. Ministries from MSME to DEPwD have been holding readiness reviews focused on scrap and e-waste disposal, records weeding, space optimisation — and disposal of pending public grievances, which makes CPGRAMS clearance a headline metric again this October. Last cycle the campaign cleared millions of pendency items; whether grievance redressal times improve beyond the event-driven October spike is the honest test.

Week ahead: LPG Aadhaar biometric gate — 6 days (October 1); trader “No UPI Day” and Special Campaign 6.0 implementation — October 2; UPI MDR switch — October 15.