Still, India can take pride in quite a few feats as G20 president

As G20 president, one of the deliverables that India can take pride in is the fact that all the major economic powers and global financial institutions now acknowledge and support its views on the dangers of cryptocurrency and other unregulated digital assets on the global monetary and financial system and that the needle has moved closer to global regulation.

Even at the height of the crypto craze in 2021, the Reserve Bank of India and Governor Shaktikanta Das were some of the most credible opponents, often speaking on the dangers of such assets if left outside the sovereign monetary supply. There were even voices from the central bank on banning cryptocurrency altogether.

Cut to February 2023. At the first G20 meeting of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors under India’s Presidency, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva backed India’s stance on private cryptocurrencies and said that there is a need for a strong push on global regulation for such assets, including a ban if deemed necessary.

A paper by the IMF in March reiterated the same points and said that unbacked digital assets posed financial and fiscal risks. And by July, the Financial Stability Board had come out with a report on wide-ranging crypto regulations.

This is not the only ‘win’ that India can take away from the Finance Track of G20 under its Presidency. By all accounts, discussions on the global economy have been relatively smoother than those on geopolitics.

Officials in the Finance Track, which is the older and bigger of the two G20 tracks, that the G7 nations as well as Russia and China invoke the war in Ukraine only as a posturing strategy for their own domestic audiences.

Otherwise, all the members are wholeheartedly said to have supported India’s agenda, including financial inclusion through digital public infrastructure, international taxation, climate finance, financing resilient cities, cryptocurrency, and reforms in multilateral institutions like the IMF and World Bank.

In a recent interview with DH, the Union Economic Affairs Secretary Ajay Seth, who is the chair bureaucrat in the Finance Track, had expressed confidence and said that the leaders would come to a unanimous joint statement.

India has used the G20 presidency to push its successes in digital public infrastructure, like Aadhaar and Unified Payments Interface (UPI). It has offered many non-G20 members, who have attended as invitees, technological and financial help to set up their own unique identity and fast payment systems.

Officials say that the idea is to expand India’s sphere of influence with digital infrastructure, similar to what China did with physical infrastructure in many African, Asian and Latin American nations in the last decade.

However, there is one agenda item on which there is unlikely to be much movement: that of debt of poorer nations. The sticking point here is China, which is the largest lender to nations outside of the World Bank and IMF.

Though a global debt roundtable has been formed, of which India, IMF and World Bank are the co-chairs, China is said to be unwilling to be part of a multilateral debt resolution solution, preferring to deal on a case-by-case basis with the countries it had lent money to.

Officials hope that the joint statement will reflect upon the progress made by India and other G20 nations to at least get China to talk about the issue of debt.