Does Mr. Modi deserve Credit for Mobile Phones and UPI?
It gets on my nerves when ill-informed people credit Narendra Modi for the popularity of mobile phones and the UPI payment system in India.
Mobile Phones.
Once the technology of cellular phone service became feasible globally, the question of frequency band allocation in India for different contenders to operate within the microwave range without interfering with other services – television, aviation, Radar, Defence, police wireless etc. became a necessity. The band of frequencies that were internationally allotted for mobile phones came to be called the mobile phone spectrum. The responsibility to allocate different frequency bands within this spectrum, allegedly as a windfall, reached A. Raja, who was the Telecom Minister in the Manmohan Singh government. Raja made the allocation to 112 contenders on, as he put it, on a first-cum-first-served basis instead of a competitive public auction. Raja was accused of offering the discrete frequency bands of the spectrum cheaply in return for bribes from the allottees. .
On October 21, 2009: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a First Information Report (FIR) to investigate irregularities in the allocation. An year later, The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) released a report on November 16, 2010, alleging that the spectrum had been allocated at artificially low prices, causing a huge national loss amounting ₹1.76 lakh crore. (Rupees 1.76 billion). The Supreme Court cancelled all the allocations to 112 contenders..
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was highly vocal and critical regarding the 2G spectrum allocations. He consistently targeted the UPA central government, labeling the allocations the “Mother of all scams” and using it as a primary platform to attack the Prime Minister’s credibility. A. Raja resigned under pressure, and was jailed by CBI Court pending full trial. He suffered incarceration for 15 months before being bailed out.
The Anticlimax and Coincidences. On December 21, 2017, the Special CBI court ordered the release of A.Raja, Ms Kanimozhi (daughter of M. Karunanidhi) and the others named in the corruption case and acquitted Raja and Co (nearly all 19 of them from the DMK party from Tamil Nadu) on the grounds that the prosecution “miserably failed” to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt. The judge stated that the allegations of a massive scam were the result of artfully arranged (set of allegations)..
No doubt coincidentally, on November 6, 2017, a month before this scathing court ruling, Prime Minister Narendra Modi flew to Chennai and, among other things, paid a surprise visit on ageing DMK patriarch M. Karunanidhi in the latter’s Gopalapuram
residence in Chennai. This social visit ostensibly was to inquire about Karunanidhi’s health. Whether he met Madam Dayalu Ammal (the merciful lady who had not been jailed due to ill health) and enquired after her health is not known.
Even more coincidentally, Mr. Modi was then seeking the support of DMK for his party the BJP in Tamil Nadu. As it turned out, the wishful joint venture at the 2019 electoral hustling did not materialize. Fortunately for Mr. Karunanidhi, he died after a few months on August 17, 2018 with the satisfaction that his daughter Kanimozhi, and favorite party functionaries A. Raja and Sharad Kumar were free.
The Mobile phone operators
The major operators whose licenses were annulled in February 2012 received their spectrum reallocation in the government auctions held in November 2012.. Competition among telecom service providers exploded. Bharati Airtel, BSNL, Vodafone, Idea, and later Reliance Jio fought fiercely for subscribers. At one stage Reliance offered free provision of the service to applicants for a whole year. The result was cheaper calls, wider network coverage, and eventually affordable mobile internet.
As early as 2010, I had watched construction workers in Noida paying Rs. 10 merely to ‘charge’ their cheap mobile phones for a few calls to their family back home in Bihar or U.P.. Mobile telephony had already become a tool of the working poor and the hawker working push carts well before Modi entered the Prime Minister’s Office with his usual flourish. .
Using the same radio spectrum bands more efficiently, telecom operators upgraded from earlier 2G service to 3G (third Generation) spectra offering, in the early 2000s and peaking in the 2010s. 3G enabled high-speed mobile internet, video calling, and multimedia streaming. and later moving to 4G. As of at the time of writing, three major mobile operators offer commercial 5G services: Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vi (Vodafone Idea)
Yet some Modi admirers continue to give credit to Mr. Modi as though mobile phones descended from the heavens the day he took office. Mobile phone, like UPI, is often quoted as one of the profound achievements of Mr. Modi. It cannot been denied that there has been progress in mobile phone coverage and features, due to the intensity of competition among the operators and rising demand by the high-end users. This must be seen as the natural progression of a useful technology, not as a gift to the Nationby Modi administration
As for mobile phone coverage in 2026, the numbers tell a revealing story. Southern states—including Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, — where BJP scarcely got a foothold but for a short stint in Karnataka — show substantially higher mobile and smartphone penetration than much of the Hindi-speaking belt that forms Modi’s political base. The difference in penetration of mobile phone service among Southern States where Modi’s party has made little impact and that in Northern States which support Modi is a massive 12%. As for use of smart phones with several useful features such as WhatsApp, AI, dictation, photo editing, high-end video games, stereo music, movie streaming, health Apps etc. is even wider. If Modi personally deserves credit for mobile adoption, why does the adoption pattern not mirror his political geography?
UPI
Praising Modi for UPI is rather like praising the waiter for the quality and abundance of the food available in his restaurant. .
The idea of Unified Payments Interface. did not originate in the Prime Minister’s Office.
As early as 2008, the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Banks’ Association began conceptualizing what later became the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). 
A.P. Hota became its founding CEO. Later, Dilip Asbe, who began as one of its early employees, took over NPCI leadership.
Then entered Nandan Nilekani, a man of exceptional technological vision, co-founder of INFOSYS and currently its non-executive chairman. 
His contribution to India’s digital public infrastructure—including Aadhaar and the conceptual architecture that supported interoperable digital payments—was central.
UPI was not conjured up by a political slogan.
China had already normalized digital payments years earlier. In 2010, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba group announced the rollout of Alipay, the first phone-based payment system. Then followed WeChat Pay, dovetailing the communication service WeChat, China’s version of WhatsApp. In October 2013, I was astonished to find that I could pay for fish in a wet market in Shenzhen using WeChat Pay—the equivalent, in a sense, of paying through WhatsApp.
By 2015, Indian services such as Paytm and PhonePe were already familiarizing users with digital transactions,
though not with the seamless interoperability UPI would later offer.
On 11 April 2016, the UPI pilot Launch took place under RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan. On August 25 same year, Rajan announced the UPI rollout. This was his last hand-wave to the Nation as the RBI Governor. and returned to the United States to resume his position as a Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He holds the title of Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance.
Narendra Modi, characteristically alert to political optics, later launched in December the same year the BHIM app—Bharat Interface for Money—a UPI-based application. But launching one app built upon an existing payment architecture is not the same as conceiving or rolling out the architecture itself. BHIM survives in a few places, commendably in local languages. This app was developed by NPCI.
The latest, and arguably the most versatile user of UPI App is Google Pay or GPay.
To claim credit for Mr. Modi is like crediting the ribbon-cutter for constructing the dam.
The Real Point
Narendra Modi happened to be Prime Minister while two major technological transformations—mobile telecom expansion and digital payments—were maturing rapidly. He didn’t time its inception or growth, but merely happened to be there. Hogging credit for the Nation’s profound transformations is Mr. Modi’s style of politics.
Believing him and eulogizing him for such innovations and their popularity without question is worshipping the wrong hero. .
