The war in West Asia has exacerbated a key pain point for the country’s economy: the rupee’s value. After closing around 91-per-dollar on February 27, the rupee fell by as much as 4.5% to 95.24 in March before action by the RBI to curb speculative bets helped it gain some ground. But new RBI data shows that the situation could have been worse if not for a long-term bet placed in mid-2022 by authorities that has begun paying some dividends. The data shows that Indian traders settled more than Rs 14,000 crore of imports in rupees in February this year — up from around Rs 11,000 crore in January. This amounts to roughly $1.5 billion (Rs 14,057 crore) of foreign exchange being saved by India in February alone. This is not an insignificant sum at a time when the rupee has been under extreme pressure due to foreign investors dumping billions of dollars of Indian stocks and debt, forcing the RBI to defend the currency through a variety of instruments.…