In a major boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi ’s initiatives, digital payments through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) surged to Rs 2,000 crore in March, a 20% jump from January.

As per the data by Reserve Bank of India (RBI), transactions through UPI , mobile-based national payment system, jumped to Rs 2,000 crore in March, up from Rs 1,660 crore in January.

“We already have 44 banks on UPI, of which 35 have their own applications available on the (Google) Play Store; BHIM is seeing around 80,000 transactions per day; and we are registering almost 2 lakh transactions on the entire UPI railroad,” said AP Hota, managing director at National Payments Corporation of India, the body that runs the UPI platform and BHIM app.

The surge in UPI is due to BHIM app (Bharat Interface for Money) and non-bank payment apps such as PhonePe and Trupay. Even Samsung Pay which was launched just a few weeks back in India, supports UPI Integration.

“We have already tied up with Reliance Retail for UPI transactions on point of sales terminals and are planning to get more merchants on board to start accepting UPI-based payments,” Hota said.

In the beginning of April, private players like Ola and Jet Airways too have started taking payments via UPI.

UPI, which uses a virtual payments address linked to a user’s bank account, was built by the National Payments Corporation of India, a central government organisation set up with the express purpose of promoting digital finance in the country.