{"id":66677,"date":"2026-09-25T09:41:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T09:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/2026\/09\/25\/proposed-upi-merchant-discount-rate-not-a-tax-cess-or-surcharge-will-not-burden-consumers-fm\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T09:41:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T09:41:03","slug":"proposed-upi-merchant-discount-rate-not-a-tax-cess-or-surcharge-will-not-burden-consumers-fm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/2026\/09\/25\/proposed-upi-merchant-discount-rate-not-a-tax-cess-or-surcharge-will-not-burden-consumers-fm\/","title":{"rendered":"Proposed UPI Merchant Discount Rate not a tax, cess or surcharge; will not burden consumers: FM"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The proposed Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on select high-value UPI transactions is neither a tax, cess nor a surcharge, and the collections will not accrue to the government, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, rejecting criticism from Opposition parties.<\/p>\n<p>The Finance Minister said the MDR is a charge within the digital payments ecosystem and is being levied by entities facilitating UPI transactions, including payment service providers, merchant&#8217;s bank and other ecosystem participants.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is not a tax, this is not a cess, this is not even a surcharge. And the collection is not coming to the Consolidated Fund of India,&#8221; Sitharaman told PTI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The proposed Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on select high-value UPI transactions is neither a tax, cess nor a surcharge, and the collections will not accrue to&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":66676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66677","post","has-post-thumbnail","category-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earlypostdaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}