# 046 - UPI Lite / Ola Electric Car / Salary in Crypto

Happy Republic Day. 🇮🇳 🇮🇳 🇮🇳 🇮🇳 🇮🇳

Before we deep dive on the UPI Lite, here are some bits,

• Ola’s CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has tweeted the concept version of electric car that the company plans to make. How much we wish that the company first delivers its promise on electric scooter?

  

  I don’t see a slot to hang the number plate, so this would definitely not pass the Transport ministry guidelines. And, no side rear view mirrors. So, I would guess that this is just a concept car, and not be the final version.

• Intel has finalized Columbus, Ohio as the place to build 2 massive Chip manufacturing plants (aka Fabs) at a cost of a whopping $20 billion. Given the global chip crisis, and aided to a great extent by the US government, Intel is steadily shifting the taking the manufacture of chips from China to USA.

• To promote crypto based business in NY state, Eric Adams, the NY mayor promised that he will take his salary in crypto currencies for 3 months. He lived up to that promise this month and collected his salary in Bitcoins & Ether. But both these currencies crashed afterwards.

  Remember, bitcoin is facing a rough time. It is trading at half the value since its peak.

• Last week some hamsters in Hong Kong were found to be Covid +ve. So, the local government took the decision to cull nearly 2000 hamsters to avoid animal-to-human transmision

  Not happy with this decision, some university student have come up with NFT coins that will digitally resurrect the euthanized hamsters. The project is called ‘Carrie’s Hamsters’, named after Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lam.

• It does make sense to check SPAM folder sometimes. A woman recently found by chance in her junk email that she has won $3 million dollars.

UPI Lite - The what’s and how

(Via CNBC TV18)

India’s UPI was a roaring success. No doubt. But the solution has one glaring problem. It needs an internet connection, which makes it out of bound for those who cannot afford or access internet.

To solve this problem, NPCI has introduced UPI Lite in testing phase, which is designed to work with phones that don’t have access to internet. Initially, the transaction amount will be restricted to Rs 200.

Technically there are two ways to do the transaction

1. SIM Overlay. In this technique, the SIM card will be enhanced to various transactions such as approval, even when there is no data connection.

2. OTA update. This would be based on the Over The Air technology which updates softwares without 3G or 4G data. If you have used Nokia feature phones, you would remember that the Snakes game was being updated automatically over the air. The same tech would be reused here. This one is patent pending.

With many countries wanting to emulate the success of UPI, it is exciting times for UPI ahead.

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Hope this edition was informative. Stay Safe and Stay Healthy.

Best,

-Senthil