Every afternoon, Nanda Kumar makes a difficult choice. He parks his bike outside his home in Chennai and suspends work, losing up to ₹800 a day. The 27-year-old Ola and Uber rider isn’t on a break for leisure, though. A brutal heatwave and a recent heat stroke that landed him in the hospital for two days cost him over ₹10,000 in medical bills and lost wages. Since then, he has been forced to stay off the roads during the afternoon hours. “I can’t ride between 12 and 4 pm in the summer months. The heat is just unbearable,” he says. …

Mita (name changed) is here, there and everywhere, managing her shop alone in Salt Lake,  Kolkata as she juggles her spatula, pots, pans, paper plates, teacups, and  dish soap. In the midst of this apparent chaos, she does some deft mental arithmetic to calculate dues, and tells her customers, “The QR code is displayed there.” Mita is one among the wide cross section of the Indian population who have adopted United Payments Interface (UPI)—a real-time, cash-less and secure payment system. The National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) introduced UPI in 2016 to facilitate inter-bank transactions for peer-to-peer, or individual-to-merchant transactions.…