How do recurring payments actually work?
You did not agree to be charged every month. You agreed once, to a document you did not read.
One permission, granted once. What differs is how often somebody checks that you still mean it.
The thing being created is permission
When you subscribe to something, the important artifact is not the first payment. It is the mandate: a record, held by your bank or the card network, saying this merchant may collect up to this amount, at this frequency, until this date or until you cancel.
Every subsequent charge is that mandate being exercised. Which is why cancelling a subscription properly means revoking the mandate, not merely deleting your account with the merchant.
Three kinds of permission, and India has all of them
Card mandates are set up on your card and processed through the networks. In India these carry an additional requirement: for amounts above a threshold set by the RBI, you must be notified in advance and authenticate the payment, which is why you sometimes receive a message asking you to approve a subscription renewal you set up months ago.
eNACH runs on bank accounts rather than cards, is the workhorse of loan repayments, insurance premiums, and SIPs, and is authorised through a one-time process with your bank.
UPI Autopay is the newest, sits on top of UPI, and is by some distance the smoothest of the three to set up, which is why consumer subscription businesses in India have moved toward it quickly.
Why Indian subscriptions break more than Western ones
Because the additional authentication requirements introduce more points of failure. Every renewal above the notification threshold involves an approval step, and every approval step loses some customers who miss it, ignore it, or misunderstand it.
The result is that subscription businesses operating in India need materially more retry logic, dunning communication, and mandate-repair flows than the same business operating in Europe. It is not a technology gap; it is a consumer-protection design choice with a conversion cost.
A mandate is a spare key you give your gym. Some buildings let the gym use it silently every month. Some require the doorman to phone you first, every time, and if you miss the call, the gym cannot get in.
Where you meet it
Every subscription you pay for. Every SIP and EMI. Every "your mandate has expired, please re-authorise" message you have ignored.