You sign up for a streaming service, enter your card, and before the actual price shows up there's a strange little line: ₹1 charged, then usually refunded. A day before every renewal after that, an SMS arrives telling you what's about to be charged. And at some point around 2021 you probably had a subscription simply stop working with a vague "payment failed" email.
None of this is your bank being weird. It's one of the more genuinely customer-friendly pieces of financial regulation in India, and it's worth understanding, because it hands you a set of controls most people don't know they have.
The rule behind it
In October 2021, RBI's e-mandate framework for recurring payments came into force. Before it, a merchant you'd paid once could keep charging your card on their own schedule — you found out from the statement, if you read it. The framework rebuilt that arrangement around consent:
- A mandate must be registered, with your explicit approval. That's what the ₹1 transaction is — a tiny verification charge (typically reversed) that confirms the card is live and lets your bank record the mandate: this merchant, this frequency, this cap.
- You get notified before the money moves. Your bank must send a pre-debit notification at least 24 hours before each charge, telling you the amount and the merchant.
- Small charges run automatically; big ones need you. Renewals up to ₹15,000 go through without extra approval. Above that, each charge needs you to authenticate again. (A few categories — mutual fund SIPs, insurance premiums, credit card bill payments — have a higher cap of ₹1 lakh.)
- You can revoke the mandate. Not by begging the merchant's support chat — at the bank level. The off switch sits on your side.
The ₹1 isn't a fee. It's the handshake that registers a mandate — and mandates, unlike the old silent auto-charges, come with a warning bell and an off switch.
Why some subscriptions broke
When the framework kicked in, every merchant had to re-register existing auto-charges as proper mandates. Plenty of international ones — set up on foreign payment stacks that couldn't speak the new protocol — simply couldn't. That's why, around late 2021, half the internet's subscriptions in India abruptly "failed" and asked you to pay manually. Annoying at the time, but it was the sound of silent charges being switched off.
UPI Autopay is the same idea wearing UPI clothes: mandates you approve once, visible in a list inside your UPI app, cancellable from the same list.
The controls you now have
Most people experience this system passively — a ₹1 line here, an SMS there. Used actively, it's a toolkit:
- The 24-hour SMS is a cancellation window. It names the charge before it happens. Read as "reply-by date," not spam.
- Your bank app has a mandate list. Usually under "e-mandates" or "SI (standing instructions)" — every merchant with standing permission to charge you, in one place. Most people have never opened it.
- Your UPI app has another one. GPay, PhonePe, Paytm each keep an Autopay mandates screen. Worth a scroll; things live there that you've genuinely forgotten.
- Revoking works. Cancel the mandate at the bank or UPI layer, and the merchant can't charge you — whatever their cancellation page may pretend.
The catch: notifications aren't a system
Here's the honest limitation. The framework tells you about each charge one at a time, by SMS, into the same inbox as your OTPs and delivery updates. What it doesn't give you is the total: how many mandates exist across your two banks, three cards, and two UPI apps, and what they add up to per month.
That aggregate view is exactly the kind of thing Fluid exists for — your accounts and cards on one screen, recurring charges detected and lined up with their receipts, so "what am I actually subscribed to, everywhere?" has a single answer. (We wrote a companion piece on running a proper subscription audit.)
The next time a service charges you ₹1, you'll know what it's doing: asking permission, on the record. That's the system working. The part that's still your job is remembering what you said yes to — and that part, at least, no longer requires archaeology.