Although the Indian government only joined the competition between the central bank's digital currency (CBDC) many months ago, it does not want to rush to launch a pilot.

Since the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) launched the data rupee pilot last year, India's recently launched CBDC pilot has already reached 50, 000 users and 5000 stores, the local news agency the Economic Times reported on February 8.

Rabbi Sankar, governor of the Bank of India, announced the first milestone in the release of India's digital currency at a government conference, stressing that government departments plan to conduct CBDC testing as successfully as possible.

"We all have our mission in terms of customers and shopkeepers. Sankar made it clear that we are going to push slowly, stressing that the Reserve Bank of India has failed to promote the rapid development of CBDC without being fully aware of the potential hazards. He said:

I want this process to happen, but we expect it to happen gradually and slowly. I'm not in a hurry to make something happen so quickly.

The new notice, coupled with a message from the official website data rupee app, indicates that no more people will be accepted in the new pilot project. According to the ICICI Bank data rupee application, the CBDC project in India is almost full at the time of writing, indicating that more users can add experiments in the future.

Sankar stressed that the new data rupee pilot project had already demonstrated 770000 transactions from eight banks since its launch on December 1, 2022. The project is now being carried out in five major cities, and nine more are likely to gradually add pilot projects soon. The senior official also stressed that five more financial institutions will add the project in the near future.

As previously reported, the Bank of India announced the launch of wholesale price CBDC in November 2022 and retail CBDC a month later. The Indian government first announced the CBDC plan in early 2022, and the release of the rupee will give a "great boost" to India's economic development. The Reserve Bank of India then proposed a three-step approach that aims to do little or no damage to the existing financial system.

India's CBDC has made progress for many years after China gradually took the initiative to launch a digital currency in April 2020. Although a large number of measures have been adopted to promote the use of CBDC, some former senior central bank officials claim that the use of digital money has been relatively low.