In a strategic push to transform India’s financial ecosystem, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has outlined its medium-term vision under ‘Utkarsh 2029’, focusing on modernising currency systems and accelerating digital innovation across the sector.
The plan highlights advancing Project Sa-Mudra to upgrade currency management while significantly expanding the use of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) to improve cross-border payments. It also prioritises scaling up the Unified Lending Interface (ULI) to widen access to credit, especially for underserved segments.
Covering the period from April 2026 to March 2029, the framework is built on 6 key pillars — robust regulations, customer centricity and inclusive finance, competitive markets, effective technology, future-ready organisation, and Global India.
The central bank aims to introduce frameworks for emerging technologies like AI and Quantum in the financial sector. It also plans to simplify regulations by reducing procedural redundancies, offering greater operational flexibility to regulated entities, and encouraging responsible innovation.
To strengthen financial inclusion, the RBI will expand ULI to improve access to the financial system, lower lending costs, and enable smoother credit delivery. It also intends to enhance system-wide contagion risk assessment, recognising the interconnected nature of financial systems.
Under the competitive markets pillar, efforts will focus on reducing auction turnaround time, improving pricing transparency in the government securities market, and increasing retail participation.
The RBI is also set to digitise its operations by replacing paper and email-based interactions with fully electronic systems and ensuring end-to-end digitalisation of internal processes. Currency management systems will be upgraded to eliminate manual processes and physical registers.
Additionally, the bank plans to promote responsible tech adoption through cyber risk capacity building, AI frameworks, asset tokenisation, and the creation of Digital and AI sandboxes.
“The bank endeavours to foster greater cooperation with the rest of the world by promoting the implementation of the UPI stack in other countries to modernise the payment infrastructure, augmenting international trade settlement in INR, expanding cross-border CBDC arrangements, and adopting global standards to enhance global competitiveness,” per the Utkarsh document.
The RBI emphasised that this roadmap will play a key role in strengthening the rupee’s global integration, expanding UPI internationally, and advancing both bilateral and multilateral CBDC frameworks.
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