India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman urges the Reserve Bank to broaden the digital rupee’s use, leveraging tokenisation, AI, and quantum technology to modernise the nation’s financial infrastructure amid rapid technological shifts.
India should widen the use of its digital rupee, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Friday, pressing the Reserve Bank of India to build on pilot programmes for both wholesale and retail central bank digital currencies. Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, Sitharaman said the central bank should “further advance” what it has started and keep improving the digital rupee as payment systems evolve.
Her remarks came as policymakers and financial firms across India are testing how tokenisation, artificial intelligence and faster settlement systems could change the plumbing of markets. Fortune India reported that Sitharaman pointed to the first tokenised corporate bond pilot in the country as evidence that digital currency infrastructure could support the near-simultaneous exchange of assets and cash, reducing settlement risk and speeding up transactions.
The finance minister also tied the digital rupee push to broader technological shifts, including agentic AI and quantum computing, which she said are reshaping finance. According to The Economic Times, she called for a cautious but open regulatory approach to new tools, warning that artificial intelligence can be used for both fraud detection and fraud itself, while arguing that regulators and industry should coordinate more closely.
Bloomberg reported that the Reserve Bank has already been running wholesale and retail CBDC pilots, and that Sitharaman wants the central bank to sense the momentum behind such payment systems. The comments suggest the government sees the digital rupee not as a niche experiment, but as part of a wider effort to modernise India’s financial infrastructure and keep pace with rapidly changing market technology.
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