New Delhi, India
India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said that about 22 countries are in talks with New Delhi to seek possibilities of conducting bilateral trade in the rupee.
In an interview with the news channel NDTV, Sitharaman said, “Also many of those countries are running short on dollar reserves, but yet their basic trade cannot be stopped."
"So they see the Indian rupee as a stable currency," she added.
The minister also added that India better understands the needs of the developing world and its leadership aimed at bringing them aboard the global developmental agenda.
Watch: Rupee inches to replace Dollar in global trade; 18 countries agree on rupee-trade mechanism
"And for achieving their development goals, they find it easy to talk to us about having rupee trade," she said.
It must be noted that the de-dollarisation efforts have gained momentum around the world in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war. Countries around the world have grown insecure over the West’s monopoly of the global trade system after it slapped unilateral sanctions on Russia.
Sitharaman hails G20 success
The finance minister also hailed the historic G20 summit held in New Delhi last week as successful, adding that it gave hope for multilateralism.
“The maturity with which Indian teams handled the G20 document at various stages makes it historic," Sitharaman said.
"The team that largely consisted of women did brilliant work. There was a spirit of cooperation among the countries," she said, adding, “The spirit with which we worked that gave of hope of multilateralism.”
Internationalisation of Indian Rupee
Earlier in March, Indian media reported that at least 18 nations had agreed to settle their bilateral trade with India in rupees.
India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, had allowed 18 nations, such as Germany, Singapore, Sri Lanka, UK, Kenya and many others, to conduct bilateral trade in rupee.
In fact, India has already begun trading in rupees with many of its neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bhutan.
India’s Minister of State for Commerce and Industry Anupriya Patel had told Parliament in August that a significant part of the India-Nepal trade was being done in Indian rupees.
Also read: India to offer Russia to invest trapped rupees: Sergey Lavrov
Also, all bilateral trade with Bhutan was also being conducted in rupees only.
"Rupee trade mechanism has been initiated to facilitate trade in national currency with Russia. As of July 2, RBI has approved 34 applications from different Russian banks for opening SRVA in 14 Indian commercial banks," the minister said in a written reply.
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