Digital rupee

The digital rupee (e₹), eINR, or e-rupee is a tokenised digital version of the Indian rupee, issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The digital rupee was proposed in January 2017 and launched on 1 December 2022. Like banknotes it will be uniquely identifiable and regulated by the central bank. Liability lies with RBI. Plans include online and offline accessibility. RBI launched the Digital Rupee for Wholesale (e₹-W) catering to financial institutions for interbank settlements and the Digital Rupee for Retail (e₹-R) for consumer and business transactions. The implementation of the digital rupee aims to remove the security printing cost borne by the general public, businesses, banks, and RBI on physical currency which amounted to ₹49,848,000,000. By 2026, the RBI's focus had shifted from transaction volumes to testing specific functionalities such as Offline digital currency via NFC and user-level programmability for government transfers.