India’s finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, has revealed
that the previous version of the cryptocurrency bill the government is
pushing needed to be reworked. “This bill, once the Cabinet clears, will
come into the House,” the finance minister told Rajya Sabha, the upper
house of India’s parliament.
Indian Government Pushing New Crypto Bill
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman answered some questions in Rajya
Sabha Tuesday regarding the government’s cryptocurrency plans and the
crypto bill that has been listed to be taken up in the current session of parliament.
“The Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill
2021” seeks “to prohibit all private cryptocurrencies in India, however,
it allows for certain exceptions to promote the underlying technology
of cryptocurrency and its uses,” according to the legislative agenda for
the winter session of Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament.
Responding to questions regarding the crypto bill, Finance Minister
Sitharaman explained that “There were other dimensions and the old bill
had to be reworked and now we are trying to work on a new bill.” She
emphasized:
This bill, once the Cabinet clears, will come into the House.
An older version of the cryptocurrency bill was listed to be introduced in an earlier session of parliament but it was not taken up.
Noting that the previous version of the bill was a “genuine attempt,” Sitharaman described:
The earlier attempt was definitely to come up with a bill
that the House can consider. But, later, because rapidly a lot of
things had to come into play, we had started working on a new bill. This
is the bill that is now being proposed.
The current version of the crypto bill has not been made public. So
far, the Indian government has published only one crypto bill — the one
drafted by an interministerial committee (IMC) headed by former Finance
Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg. Published
in July 2019, the Garg committee’s bill proposes creating a regulatory
framework for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to be issued by
the central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), but a ban for all
other cryptocurrencies.
The finance minister also answered some questions about false and
misleading crypto advertisements. She stated that there is no decision
to stop digital currency advertisements.
On Monday, the finance minister answered
three sets of questions in Lok Sabha regarding bitcoin transactions,
the high-profile bitcoin scam in Karnataka, and the legality of
cryptocurrency trading and crypto exchanges in India. She noted that the
government does not collect data on bitcoin transactions or
cryptocurrency trading. In addition, she said there is no proposal to
recognize bitcoin as a currency.
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