UPI payments could soon provide a monthly snapshot of India’s classrooms and hospitals, under a proposal by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI).
MoSPI has suggested harnessing Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transaction data, classified by merchant category codes, as a high‑frequency indicator of household spending on education and healthcare. The move is aimed at expanding the coverage of the newly introduced Index of Services Production.
Education and human health, along with residential‑care activities, together contribute just over 10 per cent of services‑sector gross value added (GVA). Education accounts for 7.2 per cent, while health and residential care make up nearly 3 per cent.
How UPI Could Track Education
For education, UPI merchant codes can distinguish payments to elementary and secondary schools, colleges, universities, professional and vocational institutions, correspondence courses and other educational services. The nominal value of these transactions would then be adjusted using the Consumer Price Index for education to create a proxy for real activity.
Currently, monthly enrolment data are available for school education, but higher‑education statistics are largely annual. Vocational education lacks comparable high‑frequency data altogether. By tapping UPI flows, MoSPI hopes to bridge these gaps and provide policymakers with timelier insights into spending patterns across India’s education and healthcare sectors.
If implemented, the initiative could mark a significant step in using digital payments infrastructure not only to capture consumer behaviour but also to track critical social services in near real time.