The Ten-Rupee UPI Payment vs. the Twenty-Euro Note: How My Friends in Mumbai and Munich Actually Pay for Things
The Ten-Rupee UPI Payment vs. the Twenty-Euro Note: How My Friends in Mumbai and Munich Actually Pay for Things
Okay so here's a scene. Last month I was at a juice stall near my building with my friend Meera, and she wanted to split a coconut water that cost twenty rupees. She didn't have change. Neither did I. So she just... scanned the shopkeeper's QR code, typed in ten rupees, and it was done. The whole thing took maybe eight seconds. The shopkeeper didn't even look up from what he was doing.
I bring this up because when I was messaging my pen-pal-slash-research-contact in Munich about this post, she told me a story that made me stop and actually think. She'd gone out for ice cream with three friends, and one of them didn't have exact change, so they just... didn't split it evenly that day. Someone owed someone two euros. It got sorted out "eventually," she said, which honestly sounded stressful to me. In Mumbai that whole situation would've been solved by four phone screens and four QR scans in under a minute.
This is the thing I keep coming back to in this project. It's not that German teens are behind or Indian teens are ahead. It's that we're operating in two completely different payment ecosystems, and it's shaping how we think about money in ways that go way deeper than just "how do you pay for stuff."
The UPI Generation
I don't think I've touched a ten-rupee coin in actual months. Not because I don't have any — they're probably sitting in a drawer somewhere — but because there's just no situation where I need one. UPI (that's Unified Payments Interface, for anyone reading this outside India) means almost every transaction in my day, from the appallingly overpriced maggi at my tuition center to splitting an Ola ride, happens through a phone.
Here's what's interesting though: this makes money feel simultaneously more visible and more invisible. More visible because I get a notification for literally every rupee that moves — I can pull up my UPI app right now and tell you I spent 340 rupees this week on snacks, which is honestly a little embarrassing but also kind of useful. More invisible because there's no physical weight to it. No stack of notes getting thinner. Just numbers changing on a screen.
When I asked my mom about this, she said something that stuck with me — she said her generation "felt" money leaving their hands, and mine just watches it disappear from an app. She wasn't saying it was bad. Just different.
The Cash-and-Card Split
In Germany, the situation is almost the opposite. My contact in Munich says most of her friend group still carries cash regularly, and a lot of smaller shops and cafes either don't take cards at all or have a minimum amount for card payments. Digital wallets exist, sure, but they're nowhere near the default the way UPI is here.
What struck me was that this isn't really about technology access. Germany is not exactly short on infrastructure. It's more cultural — German consumers have historically preferred cash for privacy reasons, wanting to keep a tighter, more deliberate relationship with what they're spending, in a way that doesn't get automatically logged somewhere. A few of the girls I talked to over video calls said almost the same thing in their own words: they liked "feeling" their Taschengeld run out. One girl said if it's just a number on a screen she "doesn't believe it's real" until she physically doesn't have any notes left.
That's such a different relationship with money than mine. I don't think I've ever felt money "run out" in a physical sense. My UPI balance just goes down, and honestly the psychological hit registers a beat later than it probably should.
Why This Actually Matters (and Isn't Just a Fun Fact)
Here's where I want to push past the "isn't that a quirky difference" version of this post, because that's not the point of this project.
The payment method a teen girl uses daily isn't neutral. It's teaching her something about how money behaves, whether anyone's explaining it to her or not. If every transaction is instant, contactless, and logged automatically, you learn that money is fluid — always moving, always trackable, but maybe also a little abstract. If money mostly moves as physical notes you count out and hand over, you learn something more visceral about scarcity: when it's gone, it's gone, in a way you can see in your own hand.
Neither lesson is wrong. But they're not the same lesson. And when I think about what "financial literacy" is supposed to mean for girls specifically — who, as I've written about before, are so often given less independence over money than boys their age even within the same household — the payment system they grow up inside of ends up shaping their whole intuition for financial independence before anyone's sat them down to explain interest rates or savings accounts.
A UPI-native teen girl in Mumbai might be extremely comfortable with the mechanics of moving money, because she's been doing it since she was maybe eleven. But comfortable with mechanics isn't the same as understanding where money is supposed to go long-term. Meanwhile a cash-and-card German teen might have a slower, more physical relationship with spending limits, but less daily practice with the kind of fast digital money management that, frankly, the rest of her adult life is going to require anyway.
I don't have a clean conclusion here yet, which is sort of the honest state of this research right now. But I think the real question isn't "which system is better." It's whether either system, on its own, is actually teaching girls what they need to know about money — or whether it's just teaching them to be fluent in whatever payment habit surrounds them, without anyone connecting that habit to bigger questions like saving, investing, or financial independence later on.
Questions to Think About
Does instant, low-friction payment (like UPI) make it easier to lose track of spending, or does the constant notification trail actually make it easier to track?
Does a cash-heavy system teach better instinctive budgeting, or does it just teach a different kind of budgeting that doesn't necessarily transfer to a digital-first adult financial life?
Are these payment habits shaped differently for girls than for boys in either country — and if so, is that about the payment system, or about something else entirely?
Where This Fits Into the Bigger Project
This post sits alongside the pocket money comparison I wrote last time. If Taschengeld vs. family allowances is about how much control a girl has over her own money, then UPI vs. cash is about how she experiences using that money day to day. Together they're starting to sketch out something bigger — that financial literacy isn't just a skill you're taught, it's a set of habits you absorb from the system around you, long before anyone calls it "financial literacy" at all. Next up in this series, I want to try mapping this against how career independence gets talked about differently for teen girls in both places — because I have a hunch it connects.