UPI processed 22.6 billion transactions worth 29,52,542.03 crore INR or 318.37 billion USD in real-time payments. At the same time, its recurring payment infrastructure, Autopay, failed on roughly 1 in every 3 of them. These are not independent outcomes. The same design decisions and regulations that made UPI safe and reliable made Autopay fragile.
Two weeks ago, I discovered the electricity bill on my ancestral home had been accumulating over two months. Autopay via credit card was enabled, but it failed silently with no notification from the bank. It wasn’t a one-off failure. NPCI data confirms this.
Autopay statistics for February 2026 showed ~28% mandate execution failure across top 15 banks, amounting to 124.22 crores INR or 13.39M USD in losses. Just three months back in November 2025, the failure rate across top banks was ~27% with losses of 7.73M USD. A system where nearly 1 in every 3 recurrent payments fail
