India is making its first-ever payment in rupees for crude oil to the UAE, a move seen primarily as promoting the use of INR or national currencies in bilateral trade, Indian media reported on Monday.
Indian officials said they were seeking similar deals with other suppliers.
In July, India signed a rupee settlement agreement with the UAE to buy barrels of crude oil from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) in Indian rupees.
New Delhi is in talks with oil exporters in the UAE and Saudi Arabia to accept the Indian currency for trade settlements.
Recent media reports suggest that India is actively seeking to settle its oil payments with Russia in Indian rupees as well. However, there has been no official confirmation.
India Seeks to Strengthen INR, Move Away from USD
Over the past three years, India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, in an attempt to boost the use of rupees in cross-border payments, has allowed more than a dozen international banks to settle transactions in rupees.
To date, the RBI has allowed trade with 22 countries.
For India, the internationalisation of the rupee will help reduce demand for dollars and make the Indian economy less vulnerable to global currency shocks.
In early December, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Kenyan President William Ruto directed the relevant authorities in their countries to work towards financing development projects between the two countries using the Indian rupee (INR).
Underlining the need to end dollar hegemony, Dr Anuradha Chenoy, professor at the Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, had earlier told Sputnik India that many countries have to bear the burden of using dollars to buy oil because of international constraints that have tied the dollar to oil purchases since the 1970s.
"The high exchange rate of the dollar and the falling dollar reserves and debt is one of the factors that leads countries in the South into debt traps," he said.
India's decision to make payments in local currencies came amid geopolitical and economic tensions, as the US unilaterally restricted trade with Russia and Iran in dollars.