In brief
- Indian MP Raghav Chadha has urged Parliament to introduce a ‘Tokenization Bill’ that would let Indians buy fractional shares of high-value assets, much like UPI broadened access to digital payments.
- He said tokenization could open real estate, infrastructure, and other traditionally out-of-reach assets to the middle class
- Industry leaders told Decrypt the bill is essential for ensuring India’s asset tokenization happens onshore rather than migrating to friendlier jurisdictions.
India’s Parliament heard an unusually crypto-native pitch on Tuesday, as a Member of Parliament urged the government to bring a “Tokenization Bill,” he says, that could turn office towers, highways, and intellectual property into investable slices for India’s middle class.
Speaking in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, MP Raghav Chadha pushed for a tokenization bill that would enable fractional ownership of real estate, infrastructure projects, and other traditionally expensive assets through digital tokens.
“Just as UPI (Unified Payments Interface) made digital payments inclusive in a way, similarly, to make investment and asset ownership inclusive, we will have to bring a law on tokenization in this country,” Chadha said.
He noted that India’s middle class is largely confined to bank savings, mutual funds, and fixed deposits, and that tokenization could open high-return assets to them while providing instant, broker-free liquidity.
Chadha said the nation now needs its own “bespoke legislation for asset tokenization” along with a dedicated regulatory sandbox to safely test new models.
Such a framework, he argued, would make investment and ownership “truly inclusive for the common man,” while giving India the clarity required to attract global capital flows from hubs like Singapore, the UAE, and Hong Kong.
India’s defining juncture
Raj Kapoor, founder and CEO of the India Blockchain Alliance, told Decrypt that India stands at a “decisive inflection point in the evolution of global finance,” calling a dedicated tokenization bill “no longer optional… a strategic necessity to anchor India in the next financial architecture.”
Such a law could unlock India-native tokenization of “infrastructure, MSMEs, real estate, carbon credits, gold, and receivables,” he noted, aligning tokenized instruments with existing securities and contract law.
“Jurisdictions that provide legal clarity are rapidly becoming magnets for global capital,” Kapoor said, noting that India remains, “constrained by regulatory ambiguity around tokenized assets” despite its leadership in the field of digital public infrastructure.
“India needs a tokenization bill to retain economic sovereignty, ensuring Indian assets, capital formation, and innovation are tokenized onshore under Indian law, not exported to foreign jurisdictions,” he said.
Without a clear statutory framework, Kapoor warned, India risks its assets, startups, and capital formation migrating offshore into friendlier jurisdictions, “often through complex SPVs that strip domestic value creation.”
His caution comes as global financial heavyweights are already signalling where the world is headed, with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and COO Rob Goldstein recently writing in The Economist that finance is “entering the next major evolution in market infrastructure” driven by blockchain-based tokenization, comparing today’s stage to “the internet in 1996.”
Three-pronged benefits
Musheer Ahmed, Founder and MD of Finstep Asia, told Decrypt that while there is skepticism around crypto assets in India, “one needs to distinguish between the asset here being a crypto asset or digital asset, which may have a variety of use cases and concerns around cross-border or money laundering.”
A tokenization bill would establish clear rules for financial institutions, open high-value asset participation to the middle class, and place India alongside global leaders in next-generation financial innovation, Ahmed added.
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