India Favors Central Bank Digital Currencies for BRICS Payments

India's preference for bilateral CBDC settlement over a unified BRICS network is a deliberate hedge: it captures efficiency gains in cross-border trade while avoiding any architecture that could be framed as a dollar-challenging bloc. That distinction matters for central banks and payment providers weighing CBDC interoperability, since bilateral corridors scale differently than a shared settlement layer. The open question is whether India's chair-year push yields concrete CBDC linkages among members or remains a statement of intent, and whether other BRICS states accept bilateralism as the ceiling rather than a stepping stone.