This isn't a top-of-the-banking-dipomatic-spectator agenda that's been pushed out to the press, as the one thing that all officials, from bankers to diplomats, are most interested in is not even on the agenda. It rests in a Reserve Bank of India recommendation quietly moving through New Delhi's bureaucracy since January which would see the central bank digital currencies of BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) linked to each other, permitting for the first time, the transfer of money between the countries without going through a dollar clearing system.

Well, it is technical, and that's why it sounds technical. However, it has more than its fair share of political agendas.

The RBI is setup to have a narrow pitch. It would like to tie up the digital rupee with digital yuan, real and their counterparts for easier and cheaper settlement of trade and tourist payments in the bloc. It is based on a declaration that was signed at the previous summit in Rio de Janeiro last year, which agreed in principle that their payment systems would "talk to each other. Governor Sanjay Malhotra has been honest about the current state of the matter: At the FIBAC banking conference in Mumbai last month, the governor had said that the whole business is still on the discussion table with "various methods, various options on the table" and CBDC linkages are only one of them. That caution matters. None of the five founder countries of the BRICS have a fully-fledged digital currency. All five are still running pilots, so what is being discussed in New Delhi this week is more of a roadmap for engineering than a product.

The best way to gauge the distance the technology has travelled is to see how far it has come in India. The e-rupee, which launched in December, 2022, has attracted approximately 7 million retail users. The real increase is from around ₹234 crore in March last year to slightly over ₹1,000 crore now and the money in circulation with banks of about ₹34 lakh crore is a huge figure compared to this increase in circulation. The pilot is underway with 19 banks, including the three biggest lenders, and fintech companies like CRED and MobiKwik and the RBI has also added offline functionality and programmable transfers to encourage adoption. It is progress that is significant. That's not yet infrastructure capable of moving cross-border trade flows at scale, and anyone who has seen digital payment rails get built anywhere in the world knows that, we're talking years not months.

The threshold that makes the government cautious about this is what Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal has explicitly rejected last year by stating that India doesn't want to develop a new currency to rival the dollar. The difference is not only lexical. The concept of a common currency would mean relinquishing monetary authority, something no country, not China or India, is willing to accept. None of that is necessary when it comes to Linked CBDCs. The payment rails are connected, but each country maintains its own currency, monetary policy and central bank. It's a plumbing issue masquerading as a geopolitical pledge, and that's allowed New Delhi to pursue it without raising the alarm like the RBI has done many times about the differentiation between internationalisation and de-dollarisation.

Washington is not buying that guarantee off the bat, and there's a good reason for that. The numbers are the sensitivity explanation. According to IMF data, the dollar's share of all foreign exchange reserves disclosed globally is nearly 58 per cent, compared with about 20 per cent for the euro and just over 2.5 per cent for the renminbi, the BRICS currency with the largest share of the globally disclosed reserves to track separately.

Intra-BRICS trade has now reached the one trillion dollar mark, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the forum in St Petersburg in June, while the total economic power of the bloc is now close to 40 percent of the world's on a purchasing-power parity basis. That's not a group that will be scoffed at simply because their individual currencies are small players in the reserve game. Donald Trump's answer has been forthright: He has labeled the bloc "anti-American", and threatened to impose tariffs as high as 100 per cent on members deemed to be developing dollar alternatives at a meeting that he is hosting in New York, New York.

This weekend's actions will not determine what actually comes out of it, but rather more practical things such as settlement processes on trade imbalances, common technical standards, bilateral swap lines between central banks and governance agreements that have yet to be fully written. Payment and digital-asset infrastructure builders who've been working on the ground for a number of years are aware that this is a gradual evolution of plumbing, rather than a seismic shift in the status quo. Liquidity is the key reason for the dollar's dominance, and for all the ingenuity of the new CBDC, it doesn't replace institutional trust built over decades just because one is connected.

What India is offering is more modest, and more lasting, because it's a more rapid, more cost-effective path to trade in a bloc that already conducts a trillion dollars of commerce with itself, and more understated enough so that Washington can voice her objections without having to find a home in a currency that doesn't yet exist.