The statistics ministry is considering using UPI payments data and salaries paid by the government to help measure the growth of education, health, and public administration and defence services. This would increase the services covered by the new Index of Services Production (ISP), the ministry said on Tuesday.The proposed use of UPI data for the ISP comes despite a sub-committee of the ministry’s Advisory Committee on National Accounts Statistics deciding against it as an input in the calculation of India’s GDP, noting that payments transaction data is not yet stable, with many people yet to move to UPI from cash. “Once the UPI transaction data get stabilised, it may be explored for possible inclusion as an indicator in the estimation of PFCE,” the report of the sub-committee, released in February, had said.PFCE is Private Final Consumption Expenditure and the biggest component of GDP when it’s measured as the sum of various types of spending.However, the statistics ministry said on Tuesday the UPI is “entering a new phase of market maturity” and growth in transaction values and volumes is showing a “clear stabilising trend” after several years of “hyper-growth”. “Looking forward, the trend strongly suggests that UPI is transitioning into a highly mature and resilient utility. Future growth is likely to flatten into a stable band,” the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) said.UPI completed 10 years of existence earlier this year.In an ‘approach paper’ to widen the ISP’s coverage – released on an experimental basis starting July – MoSPI said payments made by UPI for various types of schools, universities, other educational and health and medical services can be used to gauge the private sector aspect of these two categories. Meanwhile, these services provided by the public sector are proposed to be measured by the salaries paid by the government for various staff. Comments on the approach paper are invited by October 16.Identification of UPI payments for these categories will be done by the Merchant Category Codes. For instance, the merchant code for ‘taxi cabs and limousines’ is 4121.Meanwhile, salaries for relevant government staff are to be taken from the Public Financial Management System (PFMS), which captures budget provisions and expenditures incurred by the government under different heads.Story continues below this adFor public administration and defence, which are not market activities and hence can’t be measured through their transaction values, MoSPI has proposed adding together the compensation paid to relevant employees and operational expenses incurred in the provision of these services.According to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Rs 25,635 crore was spent via UPI on education in August, while the figure for the ‘hospitals’ segment was Rs 16,976 crore. Meanwhile, Rs 17,487 crore was spent on government services. These three categories constituted 2.9%, 1.9%, and 2%, respectively of the entire month’s Person-to-Merchant UPI payments of almost Rs 9 lakh crore.These three sub-sectors made up almost a fifth of the entire services sector’s Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2024-25: education around 7%, human health and residential care around 3%, and public administration and defence almost 11%.The ISP is the service counterpart to the Index of Industrial Production and currently comprises 19 sub-sectors covering approximately 60% of the sector’s GVA in 2024-25, which is the base year for this new data series. Health, education, and public administration and defence were not initially included in the index as MoSPI hadn’t finalised a method to measure their output.Story continues below this adFollowing their inclusion, the ISP will cover around 78% of the services sector’s GVA. The remaining 22% or so comes from ownership of dwellings, the Reserve Bank of India, and gambling and betting, among other activities. These will continue to be excluded from the index.The ISP aims to fill a key gap in India’s official statistics; until now, there has been no official monthly measure of the services sector’s performance, with private sector firm S&P Global’s services Purchasing Managers’ Index being the only one. This is despite services being the largest contributor to India’s economy, making up more than half of it for the last decade and a half or so. Industry, meanwhile, makes up less than a third of the GVA.