Digital Currency = collapsed economy?
I've yet to see an actual statement about how they (or anyone talking about implementing a digital currency) plan to release these digital currencies into the market.
If 1 digital rupee = 1 actual rupee, then if you simply say that every digital rupee has an equivalent actual rupee then you've just doubled the rupees in supply, and with that comes massive devaluation of your currency (it's now worth half of what it was yesterday), and say hello to crippling inflation.
Printing new money is generally a bad idea, unless it's regulated in such a way that you are really just keeping the overall quantity of money in the pot identical. So replacing old and worn out notes, effectively.
About the only way I see you could add a digital currency without destroying your economy, would be basically to stop printing actual money, and start "producing" digital currency at the same rate as you would be printing actual money. But this carries some pretty big risks. I mean take up of your digital currency will be slow because there wont be much of it around to start with (I suppose you could televise a big bonfire of actual rupees, and then claim here are the digital equivalents, but that sort of thing does not tend to go over very well with the public! Literally burning money is never going to be a vote winner!), when you stop production of the actual rupees you need to keep your mint personnel employed because that's not a skill base you really want to lose because you are eventually going to want to start producing real money again (if you want a balanced economy at least), and if you're not careful those very people making your real rupees, finding themselves without employment might find themselves deciding to use their skills to produce counterfeit rupees that look amazingly like the real thing! This sort of digital currency also emphasises the technological divide in your population and is likely to affect the poorest groups most. Those that carry the pitchforks and have the least too lose...
But as has already been mentioned, our bank cards do all of this already, if they want the digital economy to work better, then put in some more regulations on the banks and force them to do their transactions faster, let them hold on to our money for less time (the longer they have it, the more they can profit), but there is zero need to go and reinvent the currency wheel...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
