India, Dec. 19 -- There is a warning for all trusted systems in India in Indigo's recent operational meltdown. Imagine a similar disruption in India's digital payments backbone - the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). If Indigo's cancelled flights caused inconvenience, a payments-system breakdown could bring everyday life to a stop: We pay for groceries, transport, utilities, school fees, tolls, even temple donations through a tap. Yet this marvel of digital inclusion sits on an uncomfortable foundation: More than 80% of UPI transactions today are routed through just two third-party apps. This isn't just dominance, it is systemic dependency. And dependency at this scale comes with serious risks. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) anticipated this fragility as early as 2020, proposing a 30% cap on market share for individual UPI apps. The idea was not punitive, but preventive: Diversify traffic, deepen competition, and reduce single-point vulnerability. However, after multiple extensions, implementation has been deferred to December 2026. The delay can cause concentration to solidify and switching costs to rise, while weakening alternatives. UPI empowered small merchants, reduced cash handling, and showcased India as a global leader in digital public infrastructure. But its scale has created a problem of exposure. When four out of five payments pass through two gateways, even a minor outage, cyber breach, commercial dispute, software bug or regulatory standoff at one of the players or even both could ripple across the country within hours, impacting salary payments, kirana purchases, e-commerce, toll payments, and even public-service delivery -- thereby freezing daily economic activity. The question is whether a nation of 1.4 billion can afford to let its most critical digital utility remain so concentrated. UPI has moved from being a product to being public infrastructure. And infrastructure needs redundancies to be created before a crisis hits. Enforcing a strict 30% cap overnight could prove impractical; so, a phased, time-bound diversification roadmap is essential. A two-year transition with quarterly milestones could gradually rebalance share without disrupting user experience. It is the present approach of open-ended postponement that needs to be avoided. For diversification to succeed, alternative UPI apps need to be nurtured by the ecosystem. Smaller players need visibility, incentives, smoother merchant onboarding, regional language customisation, and integration with government services. Competition must shift away from cashback wars to real value, which lies in better security, faster dispute resolution, offline capability, feature-rich merchant dashboards, enabling international payments, and credit integration. Deep innovation, not discount-driven adoption, is the way forward from here. At the same time, resilience must be engineered. Billions of daily transactions cannot rest on a limited set of nodes. Payments infrastructure requires fallback routing, stress simulations, disaster recovery drills, and clear contingency playbooks. Regular ecosystem stress-tests should become as routine as banking audits. NPCI is no longer an operator; it is the custodian of essential national infrastructure, and thus must bear the responsibility of ensuring transparency across the system. Periodic disclosures on market concentration, performance, cybersecurity, and audit results will strengthen public trust. Digital infrastructure should not only work, it also must be demonstrably robust. So far, India has been fortunate. There have been no cases of nationwide UPI outage. But even efficient systems can fail abruptly when safeguards lag behind scale. The payments ecosystem, including NPCI and UPI users, must remember that present stability is no guarantee of things remaining the same in the future. A fragile structure can appear strong until stress exposes its weakness.In aviation, passengers can wait for another flight. In digital payments, there is no "next flight out". Prolonged disruption is a risk that the country can't afford to leave unaddressed, given how it can dent the hardwon confidence in our digital governance. The economic shock from this could be significant, but the shock to the national psyche would be much worse. India stands at a decisive juncture. We have built a world-class public payments system. Now we must protect it. This requires pragmatic steps such as implementing the cap or redesigning it with strict timelines, widening participation, strengthening the payments architecture, rewarding innovation that enhances trust and usability, and enhancing transparency across the ecosystem. Convenience must not lull us into thinking it can substitute resilience. And building resilience surely can't be postponed till a collapse makes the need for this stark; it has to be built well ahead of such eventualities....