Empowering Inclusion through Sovereign Digital Innovation: The Role of e₹-R in India’s Financial Landscape

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-772-9_25How to use a DOI?

Keywords

CBDC e₹-Retail; Financial Inclusion; Welfare Delivery; Unbanked Population; Currency Management; Digital Payment Systems

Abstract

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) appears to be a revolution in the realm of finance, and can be the answer to the perennial challenge of economic marginalisation. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) also launched the pilot of digital rupee (e₹-R) as a sovereign tokenised currency in December 2022. It is viewed as a non-intermediated product, which thus forms a structural complement to the classical electronic payments architectures. Sovereign e ₹-R has unique benefits, including the ability to transact offline, smooth integration with other platforms such as UPI, and the possibility of programmable and targeted delivery of welfare. The study suggests that e₹-R can be a solution that can address the infrastructural and systemic gaps that are quite prevalent in the under developed and remote areas, as it is an available, safe, and cost-effective monetary solution. The paper reviews the literature and secondary sources, revealing the multitude of economic and administrative advantages of moving to Central Bank Digital Currency, such as the cost savings on currency operations, the improvement in fiscal transparency and the non-intermediation of e-transactions. The results of our survey, however, indicate that e₹-R, which is in the pilot phase after launch, has immense potential to change the financial landscape of India's diversified socio-economic fabric if only it is aware of citizens.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Sunil Kumar Sharma
AU  - Qamar Alam
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/07
TI  - Empowering Inclusion through Sovereign Digital Innovation: The Role of e₹-R in India’s Financial Landscape
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Innovations and Challenges in Financial Technology (ICICFT 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 323
EP  - 339
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-772-9_25
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-772-9_25
ID  - Sharma2026
ER  -