Abstract

India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has been celebrated globally as a revolutionary digital payments system enabling billions of transactions and fostering financial inclusion. However between 2018 and 2022 the rapid expansion of UPI also revealed deep digital and social divides. This paper examines who was left behind in India’s digital finance boom focusing on the rural poor elderly citizens women and marginalized communities. It argues that while UPI represented technological progress it risked reinforcing socio-economic inequalities without adequate support for digital literacy infrastructure and inclusion.