Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday said India wants to promote trade settlements in rupee to help countries facing a shortage of hard currencies to continue importing essential goods, according to news agency PTI.

"One of the things that we in India want to do is settle in rupee, whatever the payment is to be done by those countries which import goods from us," she said in an interaction with the Atlantic Council on the sidelines of the IMF-World Bank annual meetings at Bangkok, Thailand.