Reserve Bank of India governor Shaktikanta Das will on Friday announce the policy decision of the newly constructed Monetary Policy Committee. The monetary policy meeting was held from October 7 to October 9, delayed it by a week in order to give the government time to appoint three new external members to the panel.
The government named its nominees late on Monday. Ashima Goyal is currently a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s economic advisory council, while Shashanka Bhide is a senior advisor at the National Council for Applied Economic Research – a New Delhi-based think – and Jayanth Varma is currently a finance and accounting professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Apart from these three new members, the committee comprises deputy governor Michael Patra and executive director Mridul Saggar and governor Shaktikanta Das.
What happened in the last meet in August
In the last monetary policy, the RBI left the repo and reverse repo rate unchanged at 4 and 3.3 per cent, respectively.
“The MPC also decided to continue with the accommodative stance as long as it is necessary to revive growth and mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the economy, while ensuring that inflation remains within the target going forward,” Governor Shaktikanta Das had said.
“The MPC noted that the economy is experiencing unprecedented stress in an austere global environment. Extreme uncertainty characterises the outlook, which is heavily contingent upon the intensity, spread and duration of the pandemic – particularly the heightened risks associated with a second wave of infections – and the discovery of the vaccine,” the MPC said.
“In these conditions, supporting the recovery of the economy assumes primacy in the conduct of monetary policy. In pursuit of this objective, the stance of monetary policy remains accommodative as long as it is necessary to revive growth and mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the economy. While space for further monetary policy action in support of this stance is available, it is important to use it judiciously and opportunistically to maximise the beneficial effects for underlying economic activity,” it said.
