UPI Is Live in 11 Foreign Countries, 24 Governments Have Signed Digital Infrastructure Agreements With India, and MOSIP Counts 14 National ID Rollouts

The finance ministry’s factsheet of 24 August 2026, published through the Press Information Bureau (PIB), says “UPI is live in 11 foreign countries for UPI Acceptance and/or Cross Border Remittances.” The “and/or” hides a difference. Some of the 11 let an Indian traveller scan a shop’s QR code and pay from an Indian bank account. Others join two countries’ instant-payment systems so that people can send money across the border.

This piece sorts what India’s digital public infrastructure, meaning the shared systems for identity, payments and data, has put into operation abroad from what is still an agreement, a pilot or an offer. UPI itself is covered in tuput’s pieces on how it was built and how it compares with Pix and FedNow.

Two kinds of link behind the number 11

For shop payments, NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL), the overseas arm of the National Payments Corporation of India, signs a deal with a foreign bank or payment network. Bhutan came first. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her Bhutanese counterpart, Namgay Tshering, launched BHIM-UPI there on 13 July 2021, and PIB described Bhutan as the first country to adopt UPI standards for its QR deployment. The August 2026 factsheet also lists Nepal, Singapore, the UAE, France, Sri Lanka, Mauritius and Qatar as operational, without saying which kind of link each has, and adds Cambodia, where NIPL and ACLEDA Bank launched UPI acceptance in June 2026.

For transfers, the two countries’ fast-payment systems are connected. Singapore was first. On 21 February 2023 the prime ministers of India and Singapore watched the launch of the UPI-PayNow link, and the Reserve Bank governor, Shaktikanta Das, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s managing director, Ravi Menon, launched it with token transactions. The RBI release says an Indian user could send up to Rs 60,000 a day, about 1,000 Singapore dollars, using a UPI ID, a mobile number or a virtual payment address. At the start, State Bank of India, Indian Overseas Bank, Indian Bank and ICICI Bank handled transfers in both directions, while Axis Bank and DBS India handled incoming ones only.

Nepal followed on 6 June 2026, when UPI and Nepal’s National Payments Interface were linked for person-to-person transfers, built by NIPL and Nepal Clearing House Limited, according to PIB’s release of 11 June. The factsheet adds Greece, where UPI went live for remittances in June 2026 through Eurobank, and the Maldives, where transfers between the Maldivian system Favara and UPI went live on 30 July 2026.

The count has moved fast. PIB’s 6 February 2026 release said UPI was live in “over eight countries.” Its 11 June release said nine. The August factsheet said 11.

Signed, but not running yet

PayNet, Malaysia’s payments network, announced on 12 February 2026 that it had signed an agreement with NIPL. Phase one would let Indian travellers use UPI apps at DuitNow QR touchpoints in Malaysia, and phase two would let Malaysian visitors pay at UPI QR merchants in India. The release gives no launch date for either phase.

The UAE sits in between. A card scheme called JAYWAN, built on India’s RuPay technology, was launched there during the Prime Minister’s February 2024 visit. A PIB release of 7 October 2024 said the two governments were still working on linking UPI with the UAE’s AANI instant-payment platform for remittances, and that UPI acceptance was widening in shops. tuput found no later announcement that the remittance link is running.

Then there are the government-to-government agreements. Minister of State Jitin Prasada told the Rajya Sabha on 6 February 2026 that India had signed memoranda of understanding with 23 countries on India Stack and digital public infrastructure. A PIB backgrounder dated 6 March 2026 counts 24 as of February 2026, the extra name being Malaysia. The list also names Ethiopia, Brazil, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Mongolia. PIB describes the aim as sharing technical knowledge and supporting replication, in areas such as digital identity, digital payments and data exchange. Neither document says how many of the 24 have switched anything on, so the figure counts agreements, not deployments.

MOSIP: three tiers, one count

MOSIP, the Modular Open Source Identity Platform, was set up in 2018 at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore. Its software is free to use under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, and governments choose their own biometric vendors and system integrators. Its own description of the path runs from a first memorandum of understanding with IIIT-Bangalore, through a small pilot, to a second memorandum for a national rollout.

MOSIP’s year-in-review for 2025 sorts its partners accordingly: 14 national rollouts, seven completed pilots and eight pilots in progress. That adds up to 29 countries. The rollout list includes Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Uganda. It is not tidy, since Burkina Faso and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines appear both on that list and among the countries the review says MOSIP began engaging in 2025. The home page in October 2026 shows 31 “country engagements” and 14 national rollouts. PIB’s March 2026 backgrounder says more than 25 nations are “adopting or exploring” the platform.

MOSIP puts the number of residents registered on MOSIP-based systems at more than 161 million. Its review says the Philippines has more than 90 per cent of residents registered and more than 40 relying parties, such as agencies and banks, connected. It also says Uganda went live nationally after migrating 20 million records from its old system. These are the project’s own figures, and tuput found no outside audit of the total.

Ethiopia has an outside check. MOSIP’s site describes the country’s Fayda ID as MOSIP-based. A World Bank mission in March 2026 reported that Fayda registration had passed 39 million, that more than 9 million cards had been issued, and that over 78 million authentication transactions had been recorded.

CoWIN: offered and described, with no named adopter

At the CoWIN Global Conclave on 5 July 2021, the Prime Minister said the vaccination platform was being prepared to be made open source and would soon be available to any country. He said India had given 350 million doses through it. In a keynote at the Sydney Dialogue, whose text PIB published on 18 November 2021, he said: “we offered our CoWin platform to the entire world free and made it open source software.”

PIB’s March 2026 backgrounder says CoWIN managed more than 220 crore doses and that several countries have examined it as a model. None of the government documents cited here names a country that runs CoWIN’s code.

The G20 text and the repository

The New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration of 9 and 10 September 2023 welcomed the G20 Framework for Systems of Digital Public Infrastructure, which it calls a “voluntary and suggested framework.” It also welcomed India’s plan for a Global DPI Repository and took note of India’s proposal for a One Future Alliance to help lower- and middle-income countries build such systems.

On 22 November 2023 the Prime Minister announced that the repository was complete and created a Social Impact Fund, to which India pledged an initial 25 million US dollars and which other governments, international bodies and philanthropies were invited to join. PIB said the repository then held 54 DPIs from 16 countries. The dpi.global directory on 8 October 2026 still lists 54: 12 from India, 9 from Oman, 6 from Bangladesh and 5 from France.

Who objects

On the eve of Human Rights Day, 9 December 2025, more than 50 organisations and over 200 individuals, among them the former judge A P Shah and the activist Aruna Roy, released a statement titled Beware of Aadhaar, as Moneylife reported. It argues that biometric authentication failures and errors in records have cut people off from rations, pensions and wages in India. The statement concerns the Aadhaar model, and MOSIP says countries decide for themselves which biometrics to use. The 2018 Supreme Court limits on Aadhaar are in tuput’s Aadhaar explainer. The statement itself says: “We urge the greatest caution from countries that are considering a replication of the Aadhaar model.”