India's UPI: The Localised Goldmine and the Borderless Refinery

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Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-09-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22821344
Primary Topic
ICT in Developing Communities
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

India's UPI: The Localised Goldmine and the Borderless Refinery

Kewal Krishan Kakkar
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
ICT in Developing Communities
article

India's UPI: The Localised Goldmine and the Borderless Refinery

Kewal Krishan Kakkar
article en

Abstract

India built the world's most successful public payment rail - 24.51 billion transactions worth Rs 29.82 lakh crore in August 2026, with 752 banks live on UPI. Yet roughly four of every five transactions pass through two foreign-linked applications, PhonePe (Walmart) and Google Pay (Alphabet). This paper argues that the popular debate - "is the data leaving India?" - asks the wrong question. India's data-localisation laws locked the ore inside the country; they said nothing about the refined metal. The economically and strategically decisive asset is not transaction data but the intelligence extracted from it: payment graphs, credit-inference models, and behavioural maps that are portable across borders by design. We examine the extraction taxonomy, two named legal gaps - model portability and the unresolved reach of the US CLOUD Act - the compounding financial flywheel, and propose a five-point policy agenda anchored on an enforcement lever India unambiguously controls. Core thesis: data localisation is not intelligence localisation.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
ICT in Developing Communities
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India's UPI: The Localised Goldmine and the Borderless Refinery — Kewal Krishan Kakkar · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS