It's more like stepping out of the past. It's not that India is particularly ahead, it's that the US is particularly behind.
The EU for example has essentially instant SEPA transfers now and has done for a while.
E.g.: Portugal has a great, free, cross-bank, ATM system since the beginning [1] because Portuguese banks were late to the party in regards to deploying such machines. They could learn from other countries and create a more resilient system, which has since been expanded to be able to pay various services, from utilities, fines, tolls, phones, withdrawals without cards (with phone), etc. Countries that developed earlier have to suffer with a lot of baggage and the Banking industry is not known for it's desire to innovate its tech.
It seems that for me (in Germany) transfers still only arrive the next business day. Something must be going on there...
I've done a few SEPA Instant transfers in Germany already and they really arrived within a few seconds to a few minutes.
Must be a problem with your bank, or the other banks. They must implement the instant payments in their systems.
Here in Estonia the SEPA payments were a step back, because we already had a quite fast transaction system between banks, transactions happened about every hour or so. Then came SEPA and transactions became slower, and now we have instant transactions, even better.
In fact, in India there are 4 different ways in which you can do online transfers across the banks (NEFT, RTGS, IMPS, and UPI). The latest iteration, UPI, is indeed state-of-art. It lets even companies like Amazon, Google, and PhonePe, which are not traditionally banks, to offer ability for people to do transfers from their Bank account. QR Code for UPI apps are very commonplace at least in metros and it enables nano transactions without really a fee to small merchants and users. There are lot of fail safe mechanisms and safety features built into the protocol and a user is not really hostage to the bank or the payment app as you can switch both at your will.
Girocard is a debit card. But it operates over SEPA. So „ Good luck convincing the shop owner to accept payment in SEPA instead of cash the next time you get a beer.”, no problem, just pay with a Girocard :)
In some countries in the EU there is a minimum amount required to pay with Giro but generally it’s not a problem.