India routes $80B welfare system through e-rupee pilots as BRICS dollar-alternative plan draws U.S. fire!

The Reserve Bank of India is running roughly 10 pilot programs channeling portions of the country's $80 billion welfare system through the e-rupee, with programmable subsidies covering up to 80% of drip-irrigation costs for Maharashtra farmers and a Gujarat rollout targeting all 7.5 million households eligible for subsidized food by June. The effort is designed to reduce leakage and corruption while giving the CBDC a credible use case after a sluggish start.

The numbers reveal the scale of the challenge: e-rupee has grown to about 10 million users, but cumulative transactions since its December 2022 launch total just $3.6 billion — a fraction of the $300 billion India's Unified Payments Interface processes every single month. Earlier adoption milestones were partly engineered, with HDFC, Kotak Mahindra, and Axis Bank crediting employee salaries into CBDC wallets to hit 1 million daily…