When you search for 'Bitcoin situation in India', you'll be disappointed to find a lot of news tagged with 'Crypto' or 'legal status of cryptocurrency in India'. Or, it may be that I couldn't go too deep down the search list to find one. But this is a clear indication to how Indians are legging far behind in the race to adoption of freedom money a.k.a. Bitcoin.
Other than media information, I have many other reasons,, based on my own research, that not only represent a grim present for current Bitcoin scenario in India but also suggests a very slow growth for the same in future. Let me precise some of them for you.
- The first and the foremost is the popularity of Unified Payment Interface (UPI) in India. Although UPI is a system run and managed by a central authority, it's so much convenient that you don't need to look beyond it unless you want to transfer a real big amount ($2200 approx). For smaller payments le ke regular buys and transferring of money within India just take a few seconds. Even the set up for UPI apps is very easy because you only require your phone number that's linked with your bank to login the app within a few seconds. All this is crap for me, but people generally like it here and you can see QR codes sticked everywhere for everything.
It's the same situation like 'the apple pay working fine, why we need LN' here in India. I tried suggesting a few merchants about taking payments through LN, the most ignorant answer I got "this is no different than UPI". I surrendered. I did it not because, I couldn't tell them that Bitcoin is the best money but because I knew that they can't be ready for the second reason that I'm just about to tell you.
Yes, the second reason is a monster. It aims to kill whatever notion for Bitcoin we have. This actually is government's oppressive move three years ago when 'a bill clamped down on virtual assets by imposing a flat 30% tax on profits. This tax rule was intended to discourage the adoption and it surely did manage to get a lot of Bitcoiners offload their wallets. The Indian government doesn't really know what Bitcoin is and it takes it same as Betting. Online betting in India is taxed at 30% and so are virtual assets. The Reserve Bank of India like everywhere else has suggested Bitcoin to be a big threat for economy (INR). The law clearly states that no virtual currency/asset is a legal tender in India. This has also spread a myth among people that if they use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, it's against law (it's another answer from a few merchants whom I reached).
Another reason is the mindset of people here. Indians are traditionally devotees of the system. Their faith in government and the system is still more than we see in the western world. You may find highly educated people to be advocating for the government and the fiat money.
I remember I had a discussion where someone wasn't ready to accept that INR has depleted around 100% against USD in the last 15 years. This isn't all. You may still find 95% people in India who either have never heard of Bitcoin, or they think it's a scam, something they don't/can't trust. The remaining 5% have heard of Bitcoin but 4.99% of them only want to trade it on exchanges and milk out some profits. The remaining 0.01% also have a division between shitcoiners and Bitcoiners with most of them are holding shirtcoins in a false hope of getting rich overnight.
(If you want to validate my claims, look for Indian Bitcoiners in any online forum and compare them with the presence of Indians on Shitcoins related threads.)
Overall, I'm not very hopeful of Indians adopting a Bitcoin Standard before the western world. Initially I was hopeful but my hopes have only been facing away with more and more people I meet and talk about Bitcoin around me.
This also has something to do with India's developing rapidly. There's no doubt that the wages in India have increased much more in comparison to inflation over the last two decades. People are more interested in riding on the developing economy than to be having any sort of distrust in the system.
One other reason that I can attribute to the lack of awareness to Bitcoin is the education system of India. The schools here hardly focus on technical education. The school books are still thought to be the best source of knowledge (are they?). It's a truth that Indian schools don't provide a lot of skill based education.
Overall, I see Indians are not as interested in Bitcoin as Europeans and Americans are. However the interest for Bitcoin wasn't as low in the past as it's now. During 2017 to 2020, LocalBitcoins saw good movement of Bitcoiners from india on its platform. But after 2020 the numbers have gone down to extinction levels on P2P exchanges and also on centralised exchanges. I've tried finding a good decentralized P2P platform to exchange Bitcoin to INR but it's a sad reality that I haven't found even a single offer listed.
(Do you know one good decentralized Bitcoin P2P platform with offers to buy/sell for INR?)
At last I just want to say that India's Bitcoin scene is not as promising as its economic growth is. But, Indians have to realise that without Bitcoin this growth will be meaningless in the next decade or so.