Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das on Monday said, “e-Rupee has transformative potential and sees considerable scope for digitisation of payments.”

“Going forward, other instruments like commercial papers and certificates of deposits will be tried out in the pilots along with securities tokenisation features,” he added.

RBI is working to make its digital currency available without being dependent on internet access, Das said.

While speaking at the BIS Innovation Summit 2024, at Basel, Switzerland, Governor Das said, RBI may try usage of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in commercial papers and certificates of deposits going forward on a pilot basis.

The RBI Governor also highlighted that the private digital currencies are potentially dangerous, and the CBDC is a safer alternative.

He said that so far the central bank has gained significant insights from the two pilots on various aspects such as design, technology, and user behaviour. These insights are facilitating scalability, resilience and vagility of CBDCs system.

“The pilot is also enabling us to make informed decisions like positioning the CBDCs alongside the UPI,” Das added.

“India is one of the few economies to experiment with a digital currency backed by a central bank, even as developed nations tread cautiously. The country expanded the use of its digital currency on a pilot basis, with at least 1.3 million customers and 300,000 merchants using it. CBDC usage in India has reached 1 million a day, but people still prefer using instant mobile payments mode,” Das said.

“The key objective of the pilots has been a change in consumer behaviour vis-a-vis bank deposits — we need many more transactions to understand its wider economic effects, especially on monetary policy and the banking system,” he added.

The central bank had launched the wholesale pilot of CBDC on November 1, 2022, to settle trades of G-Secs using the digital rupee. Further, the retail CBDC pilot was started on December 1, 2022.

In the latest MPC announcement last month, the RBI proposed allowing non-bank payments system operators (PSOs) to offer CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) wallets in order to make CBDC-R (Retail) more accessible to a broader segment of users.