Yes, visitors can make UPI payments now. See recent news:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/invest/in-bound-tra...

This is promising, but it’s not as exciting as one would assume — it’s a very limited rollout, ensuring the use/don’t use UPI decision has to be made quite quickly for people unfamiliar with it, which is most tourists.

> To start with, it will be available to travelers from G-20 countries, at select international airports (Bengaluru, Mumbai and New Delhi).

> Eligible travellers would be issued Prepaid Payment Instruments (PPI) wallets linked to UPI for making payments at merchant outlets.

> The PPIs shall be issued after physical verification of the passport and visa of the customers at the point of issuance.

Also good luck finding the UPI PPI sale point. And of course it’s extremely limited, to 20 countries.

And the big one

> PPIs can be issued in the form of wallets linked to UPI and can be used for merchant payments (P2M) only.

This is “limited UPI” — you can’t use it for P2P payments or paying your friends and acquaintances. And does UPI Merchant Payments have payment protection / easy dispute resolution yet? If not, tourists would be far better off sticking to cards.

So yeah, good on the RBI for making a start, but this doesn’t help tourists realise even a fraction of UPI’s convenience.

I’m sure one day visitors and regular tourists will be prompted to set up a UPI wallet when they get their visa / eVisa, top up UPI online across the length and breadth of India, and in fact be able to top up their UPI wallets before landing in the country. But there are many bureaucratic barriers before that happens.

I would say, there isn't much of "dispute resolution" in digital payments in India. Sure if someone steals your ATM ad stuff and transfers money, you can go to bank and they will try to get that back but on the whole, it is generally understood once the payment is received, its gone from your end.

We don't have charge backs or fraudulent claims because everything is conscious, with an otp so buyer beware

Totally. UPI has made things awesome for the residents but far far worse for the visitors.

I agree, India in general has pretty bad bureaucracy against tourists, it feels like the government doesn't care at all about attracting them.

But I recently saw that Wise supports transferring money to India via UPI (also more anecdotally - I am living in Singapore and saw that some local banks have this feature as well). I guess this won't be as comfortable as just scanning a QR, but couldn't this technically work for tourists?

I visited India at the start of this year and attempted to pay for my accomodation with Wise (the business didn't have a credit card terminal that took foreign cards). The payment was accepted and marked as sent by Wise, then I went to reception and they said their bank doesn't allow them to receive foreign payments and it would be returned in a few days (which it was). So off to the ATM I went again...

It's surprisingly common to just forget tourists/newcomers to your country exist. I've visited Brazil and I could not activate a SIM card I bought because it expected me to put in a CPF, a local equivalent of a SSN which obviously, as a tourist, I did not have. Many places which offered services to tourists (in English!) still expected a CPF to let me book entrance, for example.

Even living in the EU, oftentimes showing any other document than a citizen ID card issued in the country you're in will cause stress, confusion and nervous phone calls.