⚠️ 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:

🇮🇳 ramps up efforts towards mass adoption of its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) evoking concerns over human rights and civil liberties.

Topics:

✅ The Reserve Bank of India launched its CBDC pilot project in October 2022. It began as a wholesale CBDC, transitioning into a retail CBDC (digital rupee) by December of the same year.

✅ The retail CBDC pilot boasted an impressive 1.46 million users and 310,000 merchants by 2023, growing to a grand total of 4.3 million users and 4 million merchants by 2024.

✅ The Reserve Bank of India was initially considering its own cryptocurrency back in 2017, well before CBDCs were on the global radar.

✅ Early reports saw the benefits of CBDCs lying in their potential for non-anonymity at an individual level and the ability to monitor transactions.

✅ Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated in 2022 that a CBDC would "lead to a more efficient and cheaper currency management system."

✅ There were reportedly around 18,000 CBDC transactions per day in September 2023. This number has been projected to rise to 1,000,000 transactions per day.

✅ By registering with one of the 13 banks in the Digital Rupee Pilot Program, citizens can download a mobile app denoting a wallet for transactions.

✅ With only about 50% of the Indian population having internet access, the Reserve Bank is looking to introduce offline CBDC transactions.

✅ Despite hit and miss attachment of the term "pilot", the CBDC project in India has a high user count.

✅ On the flip side, concerns have risen about potential infringements on human rights and civil liberties. The fear is that control over every citizen's finances gives governments the power to harass or undermine opposition and activists.

Hashtags:

#CBDC #DigitalRupee #HumanRights #FinancialFreedom #IndiaCBDC

Question:

In what ways might the advent of CBDCs impact the current dynamics of financial control by governments, especially considering potential impacts on human rights and civil liberties?

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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