India’s CBDC usage climbs

India’s digital rupee has now been used for more than 150 million transactions worth over Rs 34,000 crore, which means the Reserve Bank of India has moved well past a lab test and into everyday payment traffic. The central bank gave the update on April 9, 2026, while still saying the rollout will stay gradual. (bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com) This is not a new payment app replacing Unified Payments Interface, the bank-transfer rail Indians already use for QR-code payments. The digital rupee is central-bank money itself, issued by the Reserve Bank of India in token form, like cash on a phone instead of cash in a wallet. (rbi.org.in) India started the wholesale pilot in November 2022 for financial institutions, then launched the retail pilot on December 1, 2022 for the public. From the start, the Reserve Bank said it would begin with closed user groups, a few banks, and a handful of cities rather than switch on the whole country at once. (rbi.org.in) In that first retail phase, four banks joined first, four more were added later, and the pilot began in Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, and Bhubaneswar before expanding to nine more cities. That slow build tells you what the Reserve Bank was optimizing for: control, not speed. (rbi.org.in) The feature the Reserve Bank keeps circling back to is programmability, which means money can carry rules. A government department or company can set a digital rupee balance to work only for a defined purpose, using conditions such as an expiry date, a location, a merchant category, or even a specific merchant payment address. (rbi.org.in) The Reserve Bank says those programmable-money tests are already being explored for direct benefit transfer schemes, interest-subsidy programs, lending, and employee allowances. That is a very different idea from a normal bank transfer, where money arrives as plain money and the rules live outside the payment itself. (rbi.org.in) The central bank spent 2024-25 widening those tests by adding offline functions and letting select non-banks distribute digital-rupee wallets in the retail pilot. It also added standalone primary dealers to the wholesale side and upgraded the system architecture, which suggests the project is being prepared for more varied users, not just more volume. (rbi.org.in) Deputy Governor T. Rabi Sankar said on April 9, 2026 that the Reserve Bank sees central-bank digital currency as “the future of payments,” but he tied any full launch to domestic readiness and to what other countries do on cross-border use. India is building the rails now, but it does not want to be the first country to discover the hard parts at full national scale. (bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com) Alongside that, the Reserve Bank is considering an artificial-intelligence sandbox with curated datasets so firms can test new financial tools before rules are fully written. India already expanded its regulatory sandbox in April 2025 to accept theme-neutral applications on tap, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, smart contracts, and tokenisation. (bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com) (rbi.org.in) So the headline is not just that India logged Rs 34,000 crore in digital-rupee payments. It is that the Reserve Bank is using a live pilot to test whether money itself can be made conditional, traceable by design in limited ways, and useful for subsidies, allowances, and eventually cross-border settlement without rushing into a nationwide launch. (bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com) (rbi.org.in)