By Neelam Rani and Jatinder Handoo
The bedtime childhood stories sometimes teach life-long pertinent lessons which must be remembered no matter how old one grows. Most would recall the Aesop’s Fables’ classic “The Tortoise and the Hare”. Remember how the swift and smart hare in all his zeal and exuberance lost to the slow yet consistent tortoise. Moral of the story is perhaps what leaders of cryptocurrency in India need to anoint themselves with. It would need an evidence based sustained engagement over a period with Indian policymakers and perhaps no other time could be better than this one to implement the policy prescription when Indian crypto market is already perhaps at its lowest ebb after a decline in the market sentiment post 30% tax rate and 1% TDS announcement by the Indian government.
Don’t Score a Self-Goal: Never Upset the Crown
Recently, at-least two interesting developments have taken place in India, which rather could be termed as the self-inflicted jibes. The first one was a reflection of sheer infancy in (mis)reading Indian public policy sentiment towards crypto and sensitivities associated with payments system environment in India, when a senior executive of a foreign crypto exchange at a glitzy crypto event in Bengaluru on April 07,2022 publicly drew interlinkages between Reserve Bank of India (RBI) promoted National Payments Corporation of India Ltd (NPCI) payments system – Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for transfer of funds to crypto exchanges in India. Remotely would have he anticipated his blithely spoken words would be a public policy misadventure, which could further accentuate the pains of crypto-traders, the exchanges, and customers in India, making them a sort of banking untouchables (at-least in perception).
Anticipating that many industry and policy analysts may (mis)interpret the statement from foreign crypto exchange executive as if RBI were paving payment rails for encouraging…
