DPI Brief — September 29, 2026

Supreme Court won’t halt UPI merchant fees — the October 15 rollout stays on track

The biggest development in Indian payments this week came from Court No. 1. On Monday, a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana, declined to stay the Centre’s new Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) framework that will levy a 0.4% charge on specified person-to-merchant UPI transactions above ₹2,000 from October 15. The bench issued notices to the Centre, the RBI and NPCI, giving them four weeks to file counter affidavits in response to a public interest litigation by advocate Anjan Datta, which challenges the September 14 gazette notification (S.O. 5067(E)) and the constitutional validity of the amended Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 (Financial Express; LiveLaw).

The framework’s geometry matters as much as the litigation. Person-to-person transfers stay free at any amount; merchant payments up to ₹2,000 stay free; transactions above ₹2,000 in essential and thin-margin sectors — railways, telecom, insurance, fuel, agricultural inputs — attract a flat ₹5 instead of the percentage; and mutual fund and securities payments get a concessional 0.02% capped at ₹300. Notably, RuPay debit cards retain charge protection without any monetary ceiling, an asymmetry the petition calls arbitrary (Financial Express). Government counsel told the court that 96% of transactions through payment gateways would be exempt (Times of India).

NPC CEO Dilip Asbe had earlier told reporters that roughly 75% of India’s 60-million-plus payment-accepting merchants have never recorded a single transaction above ₹2,000 — meaning most small merchants are structurally insulated from the levy (Rediff). The stakes are still enormous: UPI processed a record 24.51 billion transactions worth ₹29.82 lakh crore in August 2026, up about 22% in volume year-on-year (Daily Excelsior). Consumers pay nothing directly, but merchants who cross the threshold will decide whether to absorb the fee or pass it on — the exact pass-through concern the petitioners raised.

TRAI mandates cheaper voice-and-SMS-only recharge plans

At the Trust layer, TRAI has notified the Telecom Consumer Protection (Thirteenth Amendment) Regulations, 2026, requiring telecom operators to offer more Special Tariff Vouchers with voice calls and SMS only, without bundled data, and with tariffs reduced appropriately. Operators must provide shorter-validity options and monthly 30-day renewal plans. TRAI moved after finding that operators offered only a narrow set of voice-and-SMS STVs, mostly long-validity packs, leaving low-income users, senior citizens and Wi-Fi-dependent users with few affordable choices. The draft had been put to public consultation on April 7, 2026 (India Today; Vajiram & Ravi).

TRAI also tightened the screws on spam: telecom operators must now act against callers flagged as suspected spammers by AI-based caller-identification systems, even without consumer complaints (Economic Times). Both moves are consumer-first — cheaper entry-level connectivity, and a pro-active stance on the spam calls that plague Indian phone users.

ONDC and the Tourism Ministry launch a National Digital Tourism Stack

On World Tourism Day, the Ministry of Tourism and ONDC launched the National Digital Tourism Stack (NDTS), an open digital infrastructure meant to make India’s tourism supply discoverable, trusted and transactable on open networks. The stack is designed around an ecosystem of more than 23,000 tourism experiences and homestays; over 1,000 experiences — including 170 ASI monuments and 29 museums — already transact on the ONDC network. Pilots in Jaipur and Mumbai will digitise B2B tourism procurement (Franchise India). It is a textbook sectoral extension of the ONDC rails — the same unbundled buyer-seller network logic applied to homestays, guides and monuments rather than groceries and cabs.

Deadline tomorrow: free Aadhaar biometric updates for children end September 30

A consumer-action item from the Identity layer: UIDAI’s Mandatory Biometric Update (MBU) for children aged 5–17 is free only until September 30, 2026 — tomorrow. After the deadline, a missed mandatory update costs ₹125. The update refreshes fingerprints, iris scans and photographs as children grow; first-time biometric enrolment remains free even after September 30. UIDAI has already updated biometrics for about 1.2 crore school children across more than 1 lakh schools (NDTV; Economic Times). Parents whose children’s Aadhaar is stale risk failed authentication at schools, exam registries and welfare delivery points.

Aarogya Manthan 2026: 98 crore ABHA IDs, and a push to make ABHA the insurance identity

At the Sectoral layer, JP Nadda inaugurated Aarogya Manthan 2026, marking eight years of PM-JAY and five years of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. National Health Authority CEO Sunil Kumar Barnwal put the milestones at over 49 crore Ayushman cards and approximately 98 crore ABHA IDs issued. Sessions in the ABDM track pressed for standardised billing formats, treatment codification, and wider adoption of the National Health Claim Exchange (NHCX) — with ABHA positioned explicitly as a health insurance identity (The NewsMill). Making a population-scale health ID the hinge of insurance claims will raise the stakes on consent architecture and data standards — worth watching as the NHCX rolls out.

The Daily DPI Brief tracks India’s Digital Public Infrastructure across seven layers: Identity, Payments, Documents, Commerce, Sectoral, Governance and Trust.