As WhatsApp is surrounded by the ongoing controversy encircled the Israeli spygate (Pegasus) in India, the Reserve Bank of India has conveyed the Supreme Court that the chat messaging platform, owned by Facebook, does not comply with data localisation norms and it has directed National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to not to permit a full-scale launch of a payments business by WhatsApp on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
NPCI handles UPI, which hit over a billion transactions last month. The SC had lately asked RBI to brief it on WhatsApp’s data localisation status in August.
Earlier this year, the Centre for Accountability and Systemic Change (CASC), a think-tank, had filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging WhatsApp’s standards on compliance and absence of a local grievance officer in India.
RBI was made a party to this petition.
The latest development now formally shatters WhatsApp’s goals to have a payments wing in India’s fast-growing UPI network.
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