The Impact of UPI Adoption on Financial Inclusion and Household Financial Resilience in Rural Uttar Pradesh

Over the last several years, UPI use in India has skyrocketed to a mass level, with rural regions seeing particularly fast development. This rollout most likely reduced transaction costs and enhanced basic financial access (payments, receipts, transfers), which should boost financial inclusion and enhance household financial resilience (capacity to handle income shocks) through easier savings/merchant payments, quicker remittances, and smoother receipts. Measures of UPI availability and intensity at the district or block level must be combined with household-level survey data in order to test this for rural Uttar Pradesh. Important empirical techniques include IVs leveraging infrastructure or rollout timing, micro-level matching, and difference-in-differences, which take use of the staggered intensity of UPI dissemination. To monitor adoption, NPCI releases high-frequency UPI product data, while NABARD provides household/district financial metrics via its rural financial inclusion surveys.