Activate your UPI ID if you haven’t used it for or more than a year, otherwise it will be blocked from January 1,2024

Recently National Payments Corporation of India(NPCI) directed various third-party payment apps such as Google Play, PhonePe, Paytm, and others to deactivate all UPI IDs that have remained inactive for a year or more. As per the directive, inactive IDs will be blocked from December 31.

If you don’t want your UPI ID to be blocked you can activate it up to 31 Dec, 2023.

As per the circular, the decision has been taken to prevent the transfer of money to unintended recipients when customers change their mobile number without delinking their previous number from the banking system. There is a high chance that the number that one user has left can be issued to a new user. This concern is in line with the Supreme Court ruling that has said that mobile service providers cannot be barred from deactivating or reallocating a deactivated number after 90 days.

Under the directive third-party app providers(TPAP) and Payment Service Providers(PSP) are required to identify UPI IDs and numbers associated which have not been used to do transactions for a year.