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Informist, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025

 

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--RBI Sankar: CBDC is answer to payment settlement in cross-border space
--RBI Sankar: Every country waiting to see impact of CBDC on economy
--RBI Sankar:Don't want to launch CBDC full-scale before seeing impact on econ
--RBI Sankar: Do not want to launch CBDC full scale
--RBI Sankar: Multiple currencies must play global role for fincl stability
--RBI Sankar:Rupee internationalisation aims at better global fincl stability
--RBI Sankar: Most currency crises due to overdependence on few currencies
--RBI Sankar: Rupee internationalisation doesn't aim to replace dollar
--RBI Sankar: Rupee internationalisation to reduce currency risk
 

 

MUMBAI – The Reserve Bank of India will not launch the Central Bank Digital Currency on a full-scale basis before gauging the impact on the overall economy, Deputy Governor T. Rabi Sankar said Thursday. Many countries have their own version of CBDC, but they are waiting to see the impact on the rest of the economy, he said at Business Standard's BFSI Insight Summit. "You have to understand so that you can calibrate the way CBDC needs to be introduced. So everyone is hastening slowly in the sense that everyone wants to know," he said.

 

Sankar said number of transactions are increasing and there are a large number of CBDC account holders and merchants. "We do not want to rush or what we have been calling a pilot since 2022," he said.

 

In the pilot stage, bank customers hold the retail CBDC, or e-rupee, in separate digital wallets. These wallets can be loaded with money from the bank account linked to the wallet. Launched by the RBI in 2022 to counter the growing popularity of crypto assets such as Bitcoin, the retail CBDC has been positioned by the central bank not as an alternative to the domestic instant-payments system Unified Payment Interface but as a digital version of currency notes. 

 

Sankar said the RBI is broadly ready in terms of technology and use cases for both retail and wholesale CBDC. Programmability is something that will distinguish CBDC from other payment instruments, "there are multiple programmable CBDC experiments we are trying on as part of that pilot," he said.

 

Cross-border transactions are more efficient using e-rupee, Sankar said. "Domestically payment systems have really evolved. But in the cross-border space, there is absolutely no improvement as such. It still takes four to five days for retail transactions to settle," he said. "It still takes 6% for cost of transactions. Whereas in the domestic space, you know, settlement is almost instantaneous. Whereas if it is CBDC, there is no settlement, there is no risk. So cross-border space, the answer to the problem...lies in CBDC."

 

Sankar said if multiple currencies are used in global trade and global investment then the absence of any one currency is not going to create global instabilities. "It is not going to create even regional instabilities. We believe that for a more stable global financial system, you should have an arrangement where multiple currencies play a global role, not one or a handful."

 

The RBI believes that a lot of vulnerability exists in many countries, especially emerging and underdeveloped countries, because there is an over-dependence on one or two or three currencies, Sankar said.

 

On being asked if rupee internationalisation is going to replace the dollar as the dominant global currency, Sankar said, "Absolutely not, we are rational people, we are reasonable people, we know what can be achieved." The objective of rupee internationalisation is to reduce currency risk and achieve better global financial stability.  End

 

Reported by Sagar Sen and Krity Ambey

Edited by Ashish Shirke

 

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