Assam has claimed the top spot in India's DigiPay Sakhi rankings — and the numbers make the case without ambiguity. In August 2026, the state recorded 2,23,902 transactions worth ₹34.56 crore, outpacing every other state in the country and signalling what focused, grassroots-level implementation can deliver at scale. The Chief Minister's Office of Assam announced the milestone on 26 September 2026, with Chief Minister Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma personally congratulating the Self Help Group members who powered the achievement.

What DigiPay Sakhi does — and who drives it

DigiPay Sakhi is an Assam government programme that trains women members of Self Help Groups (SHGs) to function as local digital-payment agents. These women act as last-mile connectors, helping rural and semi-urban households — many of them first-time digital users — navigate UPI and cashless transactions. The model is elegantly simple: plug an existing, trusted community network into the digital economy rather than building a parallel infrastructure from scratch.

SHGs in Assam have long been anchors of rural credit and savings. Deploying them as DigiPay Sakhis extends their mandate into financial technology, giving members both a service role and, critically, an economic stake in driving adoption.

Assam's August 2026 numbers in national context

The ₹34.56 crore transacted through DigiPay Sakhis in a single month tells a story of genuine penetration, not tokenism. Assam's margin over the next-leading states — described by the CMO as 'far ahead' — suggests the northeast is no longer a digital payments laggard but an active model for the rest of the country to study.

CM Sarma's message alongside the congratulations carried a forward push: he urged SHG members to keep expanding their reach and to bring more citizens into the formal digital-finance fold. The subtext is policy momentum — sustain the lead, don't plateau.

Northeastern ambition inside a national digital arc

The DigiPay Sakhi result sits inside a much larger national experiment. India's UPI ecosystem exploded post-2016 demonetisation, and the Digital India programme launched in 2015 set the architecture for state-level adoption drives. But national averages often obscure regional gaps — the northeast, historically underserved on banking infrastructure, stood out as a challenge zone.

Assam's August performance signals that SHG-led delivery may be exactly the bridge those gaps needed. Women's self-help networks carry social trust that formal banking channels often cannot replicate in rural settings; layering digital payment capability onto that trust network has, in Assam's case, produced measurable scale in months.

If the model holds and other northeastern states take note, the DigiPay Sakhi playbook could become the template for last-mile fintech inclusion far beyond Assam's borders.