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Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das has said Digital rupee users will soon be able to execute transactions in areas with limited internet connectivity as the RBI announced that offline capability will be introduced on the Central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot project.

Das said that programmability-based additional use cases will be introduced as part of the pilot project. RBI launched a pilot of the retail CBDC in December 2022 and achieved the target of having 10 lakh transactions a day in December 2023. It can be noted that other payment platforms, especially the very popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI), already offer offline possibilities.

He said ‘it is proposed to introduce an offline functionality in CBDC-R (Retail) for enabling transactions in areas with poor or limited internet connectivity.’ He said multiple offline solutions, which include both proximity and non-proximity based ones, will be tested across hilly areas, rural and urban locations for the purpose. On the programmability front, he said that currently, the system enables Person to Person (P2P) and Person to Merchant (P2M) transactions using digital rupee wallets provided by pilot banks.