India is one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world thus creating a

huge ripple in digital payments. Having said that there’s roughly 50 crore feature
phone users in the country and to enable the entire population to transact digitally,
these users cannot be ignored.
United Payments Interface (UPI) is claimed to be clocking 100 crore transactions per
month. But these transactions are majorly happening on smartphones. National
Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) claims that less than 5 lakh of these
transactions are happening on feature phones (through *99# service). One of the
main reasons is due to the fact that digital payments via feature phones is not easy
and highly complicated for feature phone users where the experience is similar to
using USSD codes.
To come up with a solution to enable feature phone users to transact digitally via
UPI, NPCI has partnered with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and CIIE.CO for a
global competition. Here is everything you need to know about the contest that can
help create this solution and the top prize money of $50,000 or around Rs 35 lakh.