India pushes digital rupee through welfare pilots as BRICS CBDC plan takes shape

India is turning to welfare payments to drive adoption of its central bank digital currency as it prepares to put the CBDC in the spotlight at a summit of BRICS nations later this year.

The Reserve Bank of India is running about 10 pilot programs routing portions of the country’s roughly $80 billion welfare system through the e-rupee, Reuters reported Thursday. The effort aims to reduce leakage and corruption in subsidy programs while giving the CBDC a clearer use case after a slow rollout.

In Maharashtra’s Phulenagar village, farmers are receiving programmable subsidies covering up to 80% of drip-irrigation costs, spendable only at approved vendors. A separate pilot in Gujarat aims to onboard all 7.5 million households eligible for subsidized food by June, effectively using targeted transfers to scale adoption.

The push underscores a core challenge for CBDCs globally: usage. The e-rupee has grown to about 10 million users from roughly 7 million earlier this year, but cumulative transactions since its December 2022 introduction total just $3.6 billion. That remains small compared with India’s Unified Payments Interface, which processes about $300 billion each month.

Early adoption efforts have at times been engineered. CoinDesk 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 did not persist.

India’s domestic experimentation comes as policymakers consider a larger geopolitical role for the technology. The Reserve Bank of India has urged the government to advance a proposal for linking CBDCs across the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa at the bloc’s 2026 summit, aiming to streamline cross-border trade and reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar.

That ambition carries political risk. President Donald Trump has threatened tariffs on BRICS countries pursuing alternatives to the dollar and has already imposed duties on Indian imports tied in part to its purchases of Russian crude, raising the stakes for any coordinated monetary effort.

UPDATE (April 24, 90:27 UTC): Rewrites headline to explain CBDC acronym.