The 'Taka-Rupee' dual currency card would be made available starting in September of this year, according to Governor of Bangladesh Bank (BB) Abdur Rouf Talukder.
In September of this year, the "Taka-Rupee" dual currency card will be introduced. The process of implementing dual currency cards is now underway. The decision to issue cards was made primarily to help people save money.
Earlier, on June 18 of this year, Abdur Rouf Talukder stated that Bangladesh has not yet completed any currency swaps while unveiling the monetary policy for the fiscal year 2023–2024. Rupee-based trade with India is being actively pursued. Now, if someone wants to travel to India, they must first convert their money into dollars, travel to India, and then exchange their dollars for rupees. The value of the currency is lowered when it is broken twice in a row.
According to Abdur Rouf Talukder, a credit card will be introduced in July or August of this year to ease the headache of currency exchange when visiting India. He said that users will avoid the difficulty of currency conversion by utilizing this card.
The governor added that the Bangladesh Bank had not yet decided whether to swap yuan for dollars with China.
On Tuesday, July 11, the rupee began trading in bilateral trade between India and Bangladesh. This service will eventually also be offered in cash. On the one hand, the imports and exports of the two adjacent nations will increase pressure on the foreign exchange reserves that are dependent on the US dollar, which will also lower the current significant trade deficit.
Bangladesh bought items from India for $ 13.69 billion in the most recent fiscal year 2021–2022, which is the second-highest amount after China (18.10 percent of the total import cost). Contrarily, the country has imported only $1.99 billion worth of commodities. According to Tapan Kanti Ghosh, the secretary of commerce, the time has come to close the enormous trade gap between the two nations.
India, the fifth-largest economy in the world, was cited by representatives of the two nations as Bangladesh's top trading partner. Therefore, new options to minimize the trade imbalance in the future have been made possible by how simple commercial transactions are.
The initial participants in the settlement of commercial transactions in rupees include Bangladesh's state-owned Sonali and private Eastern Bank Limited (EBL) banks, India's State Bank of India (SBI), and Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) banks.
The strongest currency in international trade is the dollar. The reliance on the US dollar for transactions in the import-export commerce of various countries suffers during the corona and post-corona periods. Due to the dollar problem, some nations have begun conducting business using their own currencies. In such a situation, Bangladesh too made the decision to initiate currency and rupee exchanges with India. Without giving up for a very long time, this endeavor has now finally come to fruition.
Imports and exports will initially begin unilaterally using the rupee. This service will eventually also be offered in cash. According to Bangladesh Bank, this will ease the burden on foreign exchange.
Md. Mezbaul Haque, Executive Director and Spokesperson for Bangladesh Bank, expressed the following in this regard:
We now permit banks to conduct transactions in rupees. That is what we will officially launch. The volume of trade between the two nations is substantial. Therefore, we can profit from that business activity in mutual money.
The rupees that will be in our Indian "nostro account" will be used to pay the import expenses, he said, adding that the LC (letter of credit) will be in Indian rupees.
In actuality, the account opened by Bangladeshi banks in foreign institutions to settle the foreign currency liabilities is known as a "Nostro Account." These accounts are used to cover the customer's import liabilities for foreign banks.
