BRICS: India ditches US Dollar, buys 1m barrels of oil, paid with Rupees for first time

By Henry Kanapi

BRICS member India has reportedly purchased oil from the United Arab Emirates using its national currency for the first time ever.

In July, reports surfaced that India and the UAE have inked an agreement that allowed the BRICS member to use rupees instead of the US dollar when trading with the Middle Eastern nation.

Last week, the two nations appear to have started trading using their local currencies after energy company Indian Oil made payments in rupees for purchasing one million barrels of oil from the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, reports Reuters.

India is not the only BRICS nation to purchase energy from the UAE without going through the US dollar.

In March, the oil and gas company China National Offshore Oil Corporation reportedly paid in yuan to import 65,000 tons of liquified natural gas from the UAE.

Meanwhile, in May, China revealed that it signed $582.3 billion worth of global currency settlement agreements that will exclusively use the yuan. The UAE is one of the countries that inked the deal with the Asian giant along with Russia, Venezuela, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The recent moves of China and India underscore BRICS’ global effort to abandon the US dollar.

BRICS is an economic alliance composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.