NEW DELHI: India’s central bank digital currency transactions crossed the one million mark a day for the first time on December 27 and has since hit a peak of over two million in a day.
While CBDC or the e-rupee project is currently in the pilot stage, RBI had set a target of reaching a million transactions a day for 2023, which has now been scaled. A formal announcement has not been made so far as the central bank wants it to stabilise around the million-mark.
SBI, Canara Bank, IDFC India First, ICICI Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank are among the banks,which have seen a high number of CBDC transactions. When the pilot was launched in December 2022, RBI had tied up with SBI and IDFC First Bank for the project with a limited set of clients. As things stabilised, other banks were roped in and banks have become more liberal in granting access to the trial with more customers now roped in.
In recent weeks, some of the state-run banks have doled out employee benefits using the e-rupee, which has helped increase the number of transactions. RBI is among a select group of central banks that is trying out CBDC, with the project in India seen to have advanced faster. Initially, the central bank had begun with wholesale CBDC in the government securities market and recently extended it to the call money market, before initiating the retail e-rupee pilot.
Governor Shaktikanta Das and his deputies have maintained that there is no deadline for completing the pilot and learnings from the trial will be incorporated in the final design. Since demonetisation of high currency notes in November 2016, India has seen a rapid growth in use of digital payment through UPI and other tools and RBI is seeking to position e-rupee as another payment option as several users have wondered the need to shift to the use of CBDC from the current electronic payment options.
