All the large private banks have introduced charges, ranging from Rs 2.5 to Rs 5,
on person-to-person payments using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) beyond 20 times a month.
Although the government has said that payments using UPI would be free, bankers say that the charges have been introduced to prevent frivolous
transactions from putting a load on the system. According to a report published by Ashish Das by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT),
Bombay, banks are interpreting the law to suit them to conclude that, while ‘payments’ are free,
transfers can be charged. The report highlights this as an anomaly as such an interpretation would mean that if a user decides to use UPI
to split a restaurant bill, the transfers from friends would not count as among the free transactions.
