Srinagar, April 14 -- India's most-used digital payment system, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which handles around 7,000 transactions per second and over 4 lakh per minute, has faced four outages in just 20 days-raising serious questions about the resilience of the system and sparking a call for alternative frameworks.

On April 12, UPI saw its second major outage in less than three weeks. A similar issue occurred on March 26. Two smaller, isolated incidents were also reported, likely caused by year-end load on banking infrastructure.

Fintech executives and digital banking heads are sounding alarms, pointing out that with over 40 crore users and 83% of digital payments routed through UPI, even a 10-minute downtime halts nearly 24...