⚠️ HRF CBDC ⛓️🪙 alert from HRF for India (09-MAR-2024)

🗝️ℹ️ (Key Information)

CBDC Status: Launched

CBDC Launch: 2022-11-01

CBDC Model: Retail

CBDC Issued: n/a

Inflation Rate: 6.7%

One-Sentence Summary:

🇮🇳 India's Central Bank Digital Currency journey sparks human rights and civil liberties concerns amid significant growth and adoption.

Content:

✅ In October 2022, 🇮🇳 India's Reserve Bank initiated a pilot project for a wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), known as the digital rupee.

✅ By December 1 2022, the pilot project expanded to include 13 banks in 26 cities and test a retail CBDC.

✅ In 2023, the pilot saw participation from around 1.46 million users and 310,000 merchants.

✅ Throughout 2024, 🇮🇳 India's CBDC experienced a significant rise in users, reaching 4.3 million users and 4 million merchants, representing approximately 10% of the population.

✅ The Reserve Bank of India began considering a CBDC as early as 2017.

✅ In 2021, the central bank issued a report supporting CBDCs for transaction monitoring and promoting non-anonymity, prompting proposal for a bill to ban cryptocurrency and launch a CBDC.

✅ Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had noted in February 2022 that a CBDC would lead to an efficient and affordable currency management system.

✅ The bank had set a target of 1 million transactions per day by the end of 2023, which was achieved in December of that year.

✅ However, the achievement presented scalability concerns and technological issues.

✅ In a move to increase reliability and accessibility, the Reserve Bank of India in 2024 announced plans for offline CBDC transactions considering that only about half of the Indian population had internet access.

✅ Despite the CBDC being labeled as a pilot, the Reserve Bank of India acknowledged the significant usage, with a user base as high as 4.3 million.

✅ The Reserve Bank of India, under Governor Shri Shaktikanta Das, is in no hurry to launch the digital currency, prioritizing safety, robustness, and integrity.

✅ Freedom House raised concerns about the treatment of human rights and civil liberties in 🇮🇳 India in 2023.

✅ A major concern linked to CBDC is its potential use to target political opponents, freeze and seize money of activists, political rivals, and protestors.

Hashtags:

#HumanRights #CBDC #FinancialInclusion #DigitalRupee #India

Thought-provoking question:

How can the development of a Central Bank Digital Currency be balanced with the protection of human rights and civil liberties, particularly in societies where these are already undermined? How might blockchain technology be used to ensure transparency and accountability in the CBDC model? Discuss your ideas below.

Disclaimer: This is an AI-generated summary of the original text from HRF, forigve fuck-ups plox. If you find it useful, ⚡ the Tracker Bot because the AI and Cloud bits are not free to run.

Source of data: https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/home (npub1zhqcda52mrvcc0vkwegwsp5xtpk6l6x5kqx85f06tu9lw5h6xx0scch0dw)

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