Three years after the UPI–PayNow linkage went live between India and Singapore in February 2023, India's Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) export strategy is no longer a press-release ambition. It is an operational reality, with NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) now holding bilateral arrangements or memoranda of understanding with central banks across Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal and Mauritius, and active engagement with Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Carried forward from India's 2023 G20 presidency under the banner of 'DPI for Development', the push is becoming one of the most consequential — and underexamined — exercises in digital-infrastructure diplomacy of the decade.
For a pro-innovation, pro-open-internet observer, this matters for one core reason: India is exporting a stack — the India Stack of identity (Aadhaar/MOSIP-derived systems), payments (UPI), and data sharing (account aggregators, DigiLocker) — that is, by global standards, unusually open, modular, and interoperable. Whether the rest of APAC adopts, adapts or rejects it will shape whether the global default for digital infrastructure tilts toward open public rails or toward closed proprietary platforms.
From domestic miracle to foreign policy
UPI's domestic success is no longer in dispute. The Unified Payments Interface, launched by NPCI under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India in 2016, now processes over 17 billion transactions a month domestically, according to NPCI's published monthly statistics. That trajectory — from zero to the world's largest real-time retail payments system in under a decade — is what gives NIPL credibility when it walks into a central bank in Colombo, Thimphu or Jakarta.
The Singapore corridor remains the marquee case. The UPI–PayNow linkage, jointly launched by Prime Minister Modi and PM Lee in February 2023, allows users of participating banks to send remittances cross-border using just a mobile number or virtual payment address. The Bank for International Settlements has separately profiled this as a reference architecture for its Project Nexus work on multilateral instant-payment connectivity — a tacit acknowledgement that NPCI's API-led model is a serious template, not a regional curiosity.
The APAC pipeline
- Sri Lanka and Mauritius: Both went live with UPI acceptance for Indian tourists in February 2024, following the Reserve Bank of India's announcements with the respective monetary authorities.
- Bhutan: First foreign country to adopt UPI standards, with BHIM-UPI QR acceptance live since 2021.
- Nepal: NIPL's partnership with Gateway Payments and Manam Infotech, announced in 2022, made Nepal the first foreign country to deploy UPI as its own domestic payments interface — a far deeper integration than acceptance-only deals.
- Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines: Engagement is at the MoU and feasibility stage, with the central banks of all three having signed broader cross-border payment cooperation arrangements within ASEAN's regional payment connectivity framework.
Why the pro-innovation case is strong
The instinctive critique of any state-backed digital export is that it is mercantilist — a soft-power play that locks recipient countries into one supplier. The DPI export model resists that framing on several counts.
First, the technology is genuinely open. MOSIP, developed at IIIT Bangalore with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others, is open-source and is already in production in the Philippines, Morocco, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka — countries can fork, audit, and self-host. Second, UPI is a protocol and switch, not a proprietary app: domestic banks and fintechs in adopting countries build on top of it. Third, the commercial terms are extraordinarily lean compared with the card-network alternative; Visa and Mastercard's interchange economics simply do not survive contact with a UPI-style zero-MDR domestic model.
For small APAC economies, the choice is not between Indian rails and a neutral global standard. It is between open public rails, closed card networks, and proprietary super-app stacks. On that spectrum, the DPI model is the most pluralist option on the table.
The legitimate worries — and how to address them proportionately
None of this means the export push is risk-free. Three concerns deserve serious, evidence-based attention rather than reflexive techno-nationalism on either side.
Data sovereignty. Even where transaction data is processed domestically, governance of dispute resolution, fraud analytics, and standards-setting still routes through NPCI/NIPL in Mumbai. Adopting countries should insist on local data residency, joint governance boards, and clear exit rights baked into bilateral arrangements — and India should welcome those terms as proof the model is genuinely open rather than tributary.
Identity-system spillover. The 2018 Puttaswamy ruling by the Supreme Court of India and subsequent litigation around Aadhaar surfaced real concerns about consent, exclusion, and surveillance creep. Countries deploying MOSIP-derived ID stacks should not import those problems; they should learn from them, with privacy-by-design audits and statutory limits on linkage built in from day one.
Competitive neutrality. If UPI becomes the de facto regional rail, regulators across ASEAN and South Asia will need to ensure non-discriminatory access for foreign fintechs and that the BIS Nexus-style multilateral path remains live, so no single country becomes a chokepoint.
The proportionate take
The right policy posture — for Delhi, for ASEAN capitals, and for democratic partners watching from further afield — is enthusiastic but conditional engagement. Open digital infrastructure built on public rails is, on balance, a better global default than the alternatives. India has produced a credible artifact. The job now is to make sure its export comes bundled not just with code, but with the governance, privacy and competition safeguards that the original deployment is still, itself, learning to perfect.