India Accelerates Digital Currency Adoption Through Welfare Programs

India is leveraging its welfare payment system to promote the use of its central bank-issued digital currency, the e-rupee, as the country prepares to highlight the currency at the upcoming BRICS nations summit. The Reserve Bank of India has initiated around 10 pilot programs, channeling a portion of the country's $80 billion welfare system through the e-rupee. This effort aims to minimize corruption and leakage in subsidy programs while providing a clearer use case for the digital currency following a slow rollout. In one such pilot in Maharashtra's Phulenagar village, farmers are receiving subsidies that cover up to 80% of drip-irrigation costs, which can only be spent at approved vendors. Another pilot in Gujarat aims to bring all 7.5 million households eligible for subsidized food on board by June, effectively using targeted transfers to increase adoption. This push highlights the core challenge faced by central bank digital currencies globally: driving usage. Although the e-rupee has grown to approximately 10 million users from around 7 million earlier in the year, the total transactions since its introduction in December 2022 amount to just $3.6 billion, a relatively small figure compared to India's Unified Payments Interface, which processes around $300 billion each month. Early adoption efforts have sometimes been artificially inflated. It was reported in 2024 that several major banks, including HDFC, Kotak Mahindra, and Axis Bank, credited employee salaries into CBDC wallets to help the system surpass 1 million daily transactions in December 2023, a milestone that was not sustained. As India experiments with its digital currency domestically, policymakers are also exploring a larger geopolitical role for the technology. The Reserve Bank of India has urged the government to advance a proposal for linking central bank digital currencies across the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa at the bloc's 2026 summit, with the goal of streamlining cross-border trade and reducing reliance on the US dollar. However, this ambition carries significant political risk, as President Donald Trump has threatened tariffs on BRICS countries pursuing alternatives to the dollar and has already imposed duties on Indian imports tied to its purchases of Russian crude, raising the stakes for any coordinated monetary effort.