India’s digital public infrastructure has expanded at extraordinary speed, and UPI has become the most visible expression of that expansion. Launched in 2016 by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI has reshaped the country’s payments landscape in both transaction volume and value.
The gains, however, have not been evenly distributed. Across low- and middle-income countries, 200 million fewer women than men use mobile internet, and the gap in mobile money account ownership stands at 36 percentage points (GSMA, 2024). NPCI’s own UPI For Her work identifies roughly 200 million women in India who are ready to adopt digital payments.
This is not a question of access alone. Women encounter compounding barriers across affordability, device and infrastructure access, digital and financial literacy, perceived relevance, safety and trust, and prevailing social norms.
The policy question is therefore a design question: what makes a large-scale digital platform gender intentional, and what evidence do system designers, regulators, and state governments need in order to build that intentionality in?
This roundtable will bring together voices from government, regulatory bodies, platform operators, donors, and the research community to discuss what the evidence currently shows, where the gaps remain, and how findings can translate into more gender-responsive DPI design going forward.