UPI is booming but many women still left behind, finds study

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A flower vendor displays a digital QR code scanner alongside her fresh blooms in Hyderabad on Friday. | Photo Credit: NAGARA GOPAL

A ₹2 sachet of betel nuts or a ₹10 cup of piping-hot tea can be paid for digitally at Pujari Lakshmi’s tea stall on Hyderabad’s busy and upscale Jubilee Hills Road No. 10. A UPI QR code is prominently displayed at her stall, but Ms. Pujari herself does not know how to use it.

She keeps her broken smartphone on a stand next to the gas stove, its screen held in place by two rubber bands. A UPI app is installed on the phone, but when she has to make a digital payment, it is her husband, Pujari Srinivas, or her children who handle the transaction using her UPI ID.

“Who doesn’t have a bank account and a smartphone these days? But I don’t know how to use UPI apps. What if the money goes to the wrong account,” she asks in Telugu, as she pours tea for her customers.

Ms. Pujari is among thousands of women from low-income households and the informal sector for whom access to a smartphone does not necessarily translate to access to India’s digital payments revolution. A new study by Hyderabad-based NGO Yugantar has found that women’s adoption of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is shaped as much by trust, confidence, social norms and control over finances as by access to technology.

The study, published in CSI Transactions on ICT by Springer Nature, examines Yugantar’s Digital Budget Rani programme, which worked with 40,552 women across 13 districts in Telangana and two in Andhra Pradesh between 2023 and 2025 across urban, semi-urban and rural districts through partnerships with the Telangana Domestic Workers’ Union, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, the Mission for the Elimination of Rural Poverty and the Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty.

The research draws on qualitative and quantitative data collected during programme implementation, and also identifies three broad trajectories in women’s relationship with UPI. The first comprises users, who tend to be younger women with higher levels of education and greater access to technology. The other two groups are women who do not use UPI, but for very different reasons.

Some non-users face structural and social barriers that prevent them from adopting digital financial services. Others actively reject UPI because of concerns around financial control strategies and distrust. The distinction is important, the study notes, because non-use cannot simply be understood as a lack of access or digital literacy.

The findings suggest that putting a smartphone or digital payment system within reach of women is not, by itself, enough to ensure adoption.