UPI adoption and it's Impact on the economic well being of kanchipuram factory workers

Abstract

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a disruptive digital platform of payments in India, which provides cheap transactions, real-time and non-proprietary. UPI also grows exponentially, as it has been launched in 2016 and since that time it makes billions of transactions every month and has caused the financial inclusion of both urban and semi-urban residents. Despite the success, the studies on the impacts of the adoption of UPI on the economic well-being of vulnerable population particularly among factory employees in the industrial regions are not thoroughly investigated. In this paper, the use and adoption of UPI among 120 factory workers in Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu has been discussed and what this means to their economic performance and tenacity. A sequence of questions was administered in which demographic characteristics, pattern of UPI adoption, reason behind the adoption and an estimation of the perceived benefit regarding time-efficiency, cost-efficiency, and budgetary control were taken. Data was analyzed using SPSS 26 on the basis of descriptive statistics, regression, and mediation/ moderate models. The findings indicate that UPI has a strong penetration rates and most of the respondents stated that they use a variety of UPI such as Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm on a daily basis. The workers reported that there were significant reductions in time that went to waste in transactions, cost of transacting reduction and improved capacity to track finances and control the same. Significantly, the launch of employer wage transfer using UPI became one of the main driving forces in regards to adoption, which brings up the idea of workplace integration serving as a mediator of financial inclusion. Regression analysis was done to ascertain that frequency, and duration of UPI use were positive predictors of economic well being and the mediation analysis to demonstrate that time and cost savings were the pathways. All these findings suggest that UPI does not merely expand the convenience of transactions, but it also transforms industrial workers into financially stable and stronger. The contribution to the literature presented in the paper is in the shape of micro-levels support of decision-at-risk workforce groups and the implications of policymakers, fintech providers, and factories to increase digital payment ecosystems and increase financial inclusion in a more balanced way.