The State Bank of India’s (SBI) decision on blocking Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has been challenged through a Public Interest Litigation (PIL).
The Delhi High Court on Thursday issued a notice to seek a response from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and others on the SBI’s decision of prohibiting UPI payments to crypto exchange WazirX, according to an Asia News International (ANI) article.
The Court issued the notice after hearing a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by a law student named Arnav Gulati through advocate Siddharth Acharya. The PIL seeks to overturn SBI’s decision.
As per a Bar and Bench report, Arnav Gulati claimed that WazirX is used by nearly 1 crore people. Blocking UPI transactions to and from the exchange goes against the March 2020 judgment of the Supreme Court which allows banks to deal in transactions involving cryptocurrency.
The decision is also against RBI’s circular from May 2021 and other notifications issued by the NPCI which stated that it would not ban cryptocurrency transactions, it was held.
ANI quoted Arnav, “SBI has blocked and restricted the users and merchants to use the UPI deposits option on the crypto exchanges thereby leaving the users with no option but to use the other payment deposit options which takes more time to get completed and extra charges like convenience fees, GST charges or service charges are charged, which makes it difficult for the retail investors and users to get the funds on time.”
The bench of Justice DN Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh on Thursday sought responses from all the respondents and slated the matter for December 24, 2021.
Coin Crunch India (CCI) had reported similar news in September. Back then it was rumoured that SBI was blocking UPI transactions to and from WazirX. CCI team had found that at that time WazirX did not accept any bank’s UPI.
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