Pawan’s Story

Pawan is a 35 year old waiter from Varanasi who spends most of his day at his workplace near the Sarnath Stupah, welcoming guests from all around the world.

His journey into the formal financial system began when his managers decided to set up salary accounts for the entire staff.

The managers collaborated with UCO Bank, organizing employee files and documents to facilitate the onboarding process. This initiative enabled many employees, including Pawan, to access additional benefits such as insurance and Digital Payment Services.

When we met Pawan, he was looking to get onboarded onto UPI to transact more easily. Pawan is not very digitally savvy. In fact, his smartphone is most used by his four young daughter to watch YouTube videos. To help create a UPI account, Pawan enlisted the help of his colleague, the cook - 'the digital guru' at the hotel - Pawan and the hotel staff usually approach him for tech-related issues.

Upon downloading the app, they quickly moved past the initial stages of onboarding but got stuck at the bank linking stage. An SMS needed to be sent but was stuck.

With no clear next steps, they gave up for the day, attributing the failure to Pawan’s old phone. His friend even suggested getting a new phone.

The next day, Pawan asked a different colleague and they decided to use another colleague’s phone. Now, three people were involved in the onboarding process.

As they navigated the process, the phone would frequently get locked, requiring the third colleague’s thumbprint to proceed as Pawan and his helper kept forgetting the passcode.

Moving the SIM to the new phone seemed to work, but the next step required an email ID, which Pawan couldn’t remember if he had one. Upon looking through the apps on the phone, Pawan and his colleague found the email ID in the Gmail app, but Pawan couldn’t remember the password.

As they pondered over what the password could be, Pawan's colleague decided to test out a hypothesis. He suggested that they try using Pawan's phone number as people typically use their phone numbers are passwords. Upon trying that, they were able to sign in and proceed to the next step - linking the debit card.

They entered the debit card details, matching the visuals on the screen with the actual card. They entered the debit card details but mistakenly thought the OTP verification was for setting up the UPI PIN. They entered a new PIN, and the process continued until a vague error notification appeared.

Repeating the step multiple times without understanding the error message, led to them receiving a variety of error messages.

Confused by the messages, they decided to use google translate, holding one phone above the other only to figure out that they will have to try after 24 hours. This prompted them to abandon the attempt completely - leaving Pawan with no UPI account.