By Debiprasad Sarangi, CEO, iServeU
On the first weekend of every month, Mr. Ramesh Das, the honorary secretary of a 64-flat housing society in Bhubaneswar, clears his Sunday morning for the registers. Maintenance payments arrive through multiple channels – UPI transfers, bank deposits, QR code scans, and sometimes even cash handed over at the office. Residents claim they have paid. Screenshots begin arriving on WhatsApp. The accountant opens spreadsheets, bank statements and payment records to verify each transaction.
“Did Flat A – 45 pay?” becomes a question and that often leads to multiple reconciliation.
Nobody talks about Mr. Das when they talk about India’s digital payments revolution. Yet his story is the one that tells you how far that revolution still has to go.
The Irony That Nobody Talks About
India can move money faster than almost any nation in the world. A shopkeeper accepts a UPI payment, and the money reflects in the account within seconds. A son transfers money to his parents hundreds of kilometres away, and they receive it almost instantly.
Yet, in thousands of schools across the country, fee day still means a queue snaking out of the accounts office. Parents who paid through Google Pay show screenshots. Parents who paid through PhonePe show different screenshots. Cash deposits are counted twice. The reconciliation that follows takes days.
This is not a rural problem or a poverty problem. It is a structural one. India built a world-class payment highway, but many everyday institutions have yet to get on the road.
A Door That Was Always Missing
Bharat Connect, India’s unified bill payment network, regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, was designed to fix this. A consumer can pay any registered biller through any UPI app, bank portal, or agent outlet. The electricity board, the gas company, the broadband provider: all appear as clean, searchable billers on every payment app in India.
But there was a catch. Getting listed on Bharat Connect required technology infrastructure with APIs, integration teams, certification cycles. A cooperative credit society in Sambalpur collecting monthly dues from 400 members cannot afford that. Neither can a school in Puri, where fee day still means a queue stretching out of the office. Neither can a temple trust receiving donations and managing annual memberships. Despite all the collections, they remained invisible to the digital payment network. Not because they were too small, but because nobody had built them a door.
What has changed, quietly, is that Bharat Connect now has a route for these organisations. Through a file-based onboarding mechanism, an institution with no technology team can go live on the national payment network. No API. No software vendor. No six-month implementation. The institution shares its billing data as a simple spreadsheet, handed to a licensed Biller Operating Unit that manages all technical integration, NPCI certification, and settlement reporting on the institution’s behalf. Within five to fourteen days, that institution’s bills appear across 150 payment channels.
Mr. Ramesh Das gets his Saturday nights back.
Why This Matters Across Every Institution
For housing societies, the impact is immediate. Monthly maintenance, parking charges, community hall bookings, every payment now reflects automatically against the correct flat, tagged with a unique transaction ID. The WhatsApp screenshot problem disappears. The midnight reconciliation session disappears.
For schools and colleges, the shift is more emotional. A parent working rotating factory shifts outside Angul cannot always reach the accounts office during business hours. Under the old system, they sent cash through their child or took a half-day. Under the new one, they pay tuition fees, transport charges, hostel dues, and examination fees at eleven at night from the factory floor — and the school’s dashboard registers the payment before the teacher checks records in the morning.
For clubs, associations, and community organisations, the change means membership renewals and event registrations no longer require a physical visit. For religious and community bodies donations and membership dues can now arrive from any channel, including from a member in another city, without the treasurer spending a week reconciling what came from where.
The common thread across all of them is the same: people who were already paying, through whatever channel was available to them, can now pay through a single, traceable, standardised system that settles automatically.
The Scale of What Remains Outside
The opportunity here is not incremental.
India has over a million registered housing societies. There are close to a million schools. Thousands of cooperative credit societies, municipal bodies, NBFCs, and local service organisations still run collections through fragmented channels, manual matching, and settlement cycles stretching three to five days.
UPI processed 24,162 crore transactions worth ₹314 lakh crore, in the FY 2025 – 26. Yet a significant share of India’s recurring payment volume like school fees, society maintenance, cooperative dues, hospital collections, flows outside any standardised digital framework. Estimates suggest that recurring collections outside the formal bill payment ecosystem run into hundreds of thousands of crores annually.
In a Tier-3 town in Odisha or Chhattisgarh, a credit cooperative might be collecting cash from 600 members every month, maintaining a physical ledger, and waiting until month-end to know how much has actually come in. Each of these organisations brought onto Bharat Connect is every member of that institution gaining access to infrastructure that already sits in their pocket.
One NBFC that piloted this model reported that within three months of going live, over a third of its EMI collections had migrated to the digital network — without building a single line of code.
The Friction That Remained
None of this arrives without resistance.
The harder challenge is rarely the technology. Institutions that struggle most are those with inconsistent records, unprepared staff, and no plan to inform the very residents and parents they are trying to serve.
Industry observers note that successful adoption will depend not only on technology availability but also on awareness and operational readiness among institutions.
The Bigger Picture
Somewhere in a school in Koraput, a parent might pay next month’s tuition fee at eleven in the night. Somewhere in Sambalpur, a reconciliation report might get generated, without anyone staying past midnight to build it.
India’s digital payment story has always been told through dramatic numbers. But the story that matters most is the quieter one. Happening in accounts offices, committee rooms, and treasurer’s registers across the country. When more schools, more cooperative societies, more hospitals, more religious organisations, and more community bodies join this network, when a parent can pay school fees the same way they pay an electricity bill, India’s payment revolution will have reached the places where most Indians actually live.
That moment is not far away. The door, finally, is open.