NEW DELHI, September 10 India assured that it will offer Russia promising areas where it can invest billions of rupees stuck in its accounts, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a press conference following the summit G20.
“In the current situation, many billions of rupees have accumulated, which have not yet found their application. Our Indian friends assured that they will offer promising areas where they can be invested,” he said.
Indian importers began to use the national currency in international trade calculations from November 2022.
The head of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, in June assessed the scale of the accumulated revenue of Russian companies in rupees as small when compared with the entire volume of foreign currency earnings. Her deputy Alexey Zabotin added that they are gradually decreasing.
At the end of August, the former head of Otkritie Bank, Mikhail Zadornov, called the reason for the weakening of the ruble recently precisely problems with the conversion of Indian currency received by oil companies. However, his words were refuted by the Ministry of Energy, noting that exporters return most of the foreign exchange earnings regardless of the currency of payment.
The trade turnover between Moscow and New Delhi in the last half of the year increased almost threefold — to $33.5 billion . At the same time, the trade deficit over the same period expanded 3.3 times — to 29.6 billion dollars.