"Of course BHIM is giving crazy cashbacks. That's where I pay my bills."

That's not a BHIM fan but a product head at a competing UPI app.

After demonetisation hit in 2016, India desperately needed a way to go cashless overnight. UPI existed but barely anyone was using it. Banks were dragging their feet and private players were too small and too few. So, NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) built an entire payments app in weeks and put the Prime Minister behind it. BHIM clocked 10 million downloads in just 10 days. 

But just as quietly, NPCI put it to sleep and the private players took the bait.

Fast forward to today, PhonePe and Google Pay between them own over 80% of all UPI transactions. Two American-backed companies are winning on the very road NPCI laid, while the architect has 0.8% market share on its own railway.

So BHIM is back. With MS Dhoni as brand ambassador, cashbacks flying left, right and centre and a stated goal of hitting 5% market share. 
But can a government app out-app the giants it created? And why is it back and why now?

Rahel Philipose and Praveen Gopal Krishnan sit down with Arundhati Ramanathan, deputy editor at The Ken who wrote the original BHIM story in 2017, and Abhishek Madan, co-founder of Alt Inc and former VP of product at Paytm, to find out.

Read more:

- The unlikely story of BHIM, the upsetter of plans by Arundhati Ramanathan (25 January 2017)

- NPCI resurrects its own UPI payments app dreams with Bhim by Arundhati Ramanathan (19 March 2026)

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This episode was produced by Uddantika Kashyap and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer.

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