Digital Payments, Mobile Phones and Platform Economies

Detailed chapter description

Chapter 125 examines the contemporary economy through the devices, payment rails and software platforms that increasingly coordinate everyday exchange. The smartphone is now simultaneously a telephone, identity token, bank interface, shop counter, map, workplace, classroom, ticket office and remittance terminal. Yet digitalisation is not a clean replacement of older institutions. Cash remains important; assisted banking remains essential; households share devices; mobile networks fail; and small merchants combine QR payments with notebooks and cash boxes. The correct historical frame is therefore a layered economy in which digital systems reduce some transaction costs while creating new dependencies on electricity, connectivity, authentication, software design, data governance and platform rules. The scale of India’s payment transition is unmistakable but should be dated carefully. NPCI’s published monthly series records 22.716 billion UPI transactions worth about ₹28.92 lakh crore in June 2026. The RBI’s Digital Payments Index, with March 2018 = 100, reached 516.76 in September 2025. These are national indicators, not district measures for Mithila, Vajji or Anga. Likewise, TRAI reported 89.56 million internet subscriptions in the Bihar telecom service area at the end of March 2026, but that service area includes Jharkhand. The regional historian must therefore resist converting regulatory geographies into cultural geographies and instead combine national rails, service-area infrastructure and local household/merchant evidence. Across the India–Nepal border, digital integration now has a chronology of its own. Indian UPI users gained QR-based person-to-merchant acceptance at participating Nepalese merchants in 2024. In June 2026, India’s UPI and Nepal’s National Payments Interface were linked for real-time person-to-person remittances through participating institutions. These are distinct systems serving different transaction types. Together they show how the older border economy of family remittances, pilgrimage, shopping and petty trade is acquiring a digital layer without eliminating cash, foreign-exchange rules, bank regulation or informal exchange.