Bridging the Last Mile: The Battle Against UPI Fraud in Rural India A Case from Maharashtra

Abstract

India’s rapid adoption of digital payments, led by the Unified Payment Interface, has changed transactions and widened financial inclusion, reaching remote areas. Yet this progress has coincided with a sharp rise in digital fraud that hurts first generation, low literacy users. This teaching case examines a composite event from Latur district in Maharashtra, where a sixty-eight-year-old farmer, Ramesh Pawar, loses Rs. 85,000 after a fake KYC message and struggles to obtain redress. The discussion is set against rising UPI fraud and Maharashtra’s cybercrime burden, and it highlights gaps in early detection, frontline policing, banking procedures, and digital literacy.

Presented as a character driven narrative grounded in official statistics, the case follows the actions and constraints of key stakeholders, including the local police station, State Cyber Cell, a cooperative bank, NPCI, and civil society groups working on digital literacy. It invites reflection on systematic accountability, limits of user responsibility rhetoric, and design of safeguards and grievance systems suited to rural contexts. The case is intended for postgraduate courses in public policy, law, digital governance, and financial regulation, and for practitioners concerned with inclusive and trustworthy digital payments.