The solution
India's farmers and small businesses mostly sit outside the credit file: no formal cash-flow history, no collateral paperwork, no credit score. A tenant farmer without a land title could not borrow for inputs at all. The Reserve Bank answered with infrastructure rather than subsidy: in August 2023 it announced a Public Tech Platform for Frictionless Credit, built by its Reserve Bank Innovation Hub, and in August 2024 gave it the name Unified Lending Interface.
ULI is a consent-based data bus for lending. State land records, milk cooperatives' payment records, satellite imagery and other databases connect through standardised, plug-and-play APIs, so one integration reaches every source. The RBI's own example: a lender reads a dairy farmer's cash flow from the milk cooperative, her ownership status from the state's land records and her cropping pattern from agricultural data — and can sanction and disburse within minutes. Because identity can be established by the end use of funds, even tenant farmers without titles can borrow for inputs.
RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das pitched it plainly at the RBI@90 conference: ULI is 'the UPI on the credit side'. By mid-2025 the central government was actively scaling it — the Department of Financial Services told ministries and states to digitise land records and integrate their datasets, and Deputy Governor T. Rabi Sankar said ULI could surpass UPI's impact. The Rural Development Ministry reported 95% of rural land records already digitised, which is what makes the platform's core dataset possible.
What it achieved
Plug government data silos into one lending API
Why it worked
A borrower invisible to one lender becomes legible to every lender at once, so competition replaces relationship banking at the bottom of the pyramid.
Standardised APIs mean each data provider integrates once instead of striking a separate deal with every bank.
Consent-based architecture puts the borrower in the loop, addressing the privacy objection that killed earlier data-sharing designs.
Underwriting against end use of funds lets landless farmers borrow, which collateral rules made impossible.
What can be applied
Credit is scarce where data is invisible. The fix is not cheaper money but a standard interface that makes a borrower's real economic life legible to any lender at once.
Aftermath
The platform is live in pilots and being scaled as national digital public infrastructure, with the finance ministry pushing states to connect land records. Open questions remain: RBI had not published the detailed consent mechanics by mid-2025, an RTI response said ULI itself stores neither data nor consent, and policy researchers warn that legacy errors in digitised land records — land disputes are two-thirds of India's civil cases — could translate into wrongful loan denials. The design bet is that standardising access is the hard part; consent and redress can be added on top.
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