Both the regulator and the government are working on digital currency, says Nirmala Sitharaman
India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said the Government of India and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) are actively engaged in improving the central bank digital currency (CBDC) so that it can be used for cross-border payments. “We strongly believe it helps in cross-border payments. It will bring in greater transparency and traceability,” she said at a function in New Delhi.
RBI began the pilot project wholesale CBDC and picked up nine banks — State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, YES Bank, IDFC First Bank, and HSBC. Besides, RBI has already rolled out a pilot in the retail version of CBDC or the e-rupee on December 1, 2022. The e-rupee is in the form of a digital token that represents legal tender.
The Digital Currency is being issued in the same denominations as the paper currency and coins. It is being distributed through financial intermediaries, i.E. Banks. Users can transact with e-rupee through a digital wallet offered by the participating banks. She said it helps speed up payments with less cost, adding it brings down costs for inward and outward remittance. “Both the regulator and the government are working on it. We are actively engaged in it,” she said.
Asked about priority sectors to make India ‘Viksit Bharat‘, she said, the focus areas would be manufacturing and agriculture. “Agriculture retains its primacy and we are looking at strengthening agriculture by modernizing some of the practices, post-harvest practices, and so on,” said Finance Minister. In manufacturing, she said, the Government had identified 13 sunrise sectors including renewable energy, semiconductor, machine learning, earth sciences, and space.
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