RBI releases October board meeting minutes, opens doors to transparency

In a first, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released minutes of its central board meeting held in Chandigarh on October 11. This comes as the first step towards increasing transparency in its workings.

“In future, the minutes will be placed on the RBI website within two weeks from the date of its confirmation in the next meeting of the Central Board and on being signed by the chairman in the same meeting,” the regulator said on January 20.

The October meeting minutes, parts of which have been redacted, showed that the board discussed issues relating to Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank, regulatory supervision of commercial and cooperative banks as well as non-banks, which were not part of the agenda at first.

It must be noted that the PMC Bank was placed under directions on September 24 apparently after the agenda for the meeting had been prepared.

The minutes also showed that the board was informed about the formation of a separate department of regulation and supervision that had earlier been approved by the board and would take effect from November 1.

On the parts that were blacked out, RBI said that it did so in accordance to the norms which permitted severing certain information under the RTI Act.

The next central board meet was held in Bhubaneswar on December 13.