RBI: what the central bank is doing

The RBI section’s bundles are rbi/*. Code: compute/rbi.py and publish/rbi.py; step rbi. All data are the Reserve Bank of India’s, reused with acknowledgement of the RBI as the source.

Sources

| Exact effective dates of every policy-rate change (Bank Rate and CRR from 1935, SLR 1949, repo 2001, MSF 2011, SDF 2022); MPC decisions and each member’s vote (61 meetings since Oct 2016); WALR, WADTDR and MCLR; G-sec, T-bill and SDL auction results | Data bank source rbi (RBI Handbook of Statistics, Monetary Policy Statements and minutes, lending-rate releases, auction press releases) |

Measures

Policy

• Corridor and reserve ratios.
• rate_changes uses effective dates from the RBI Handbook and MPC resolutions. The weekly corridor series dates each change by its first WSS print, 0–2 days after the effective date for every repo change since 2019.
• MPC table, one row per meeting:
  • decision, repo before and after, SDF and MSF, stance
  • votes for and against, dissenters
  • preference_range_bps, the spread of members’ preferred moves (left blank when the minutes give no preferred size)
  • days since the last move, and links to the resolution and minutes
• Per-member votes come from the minutes.

Transmission

• Monthly repo against WALR (fresh and outstanding), WADTDR (fresh and outstanding) and the median 1-year MCLR, for scheduled commercial banks.

• Since the easing began (Jan 2025 to the latest month):

  Rate	Change
  Repo	−125 bp
  Fresh WALR	−72 bp
  Outstanding WALR	−91 bp
  Fresh WADTDR	−95 bp
  Outstanding WADTDR	−53 bp
  MCLR	−39 bp

• Outstanding rates reprice gradually. External-benchmark loans have moved faster than MCLR loans.

Liquidity

• The call rate (WACR) and TREPS against the repo rate, in basis points. Below zero means surplus liquidity; above zero means a deficit.
• Daily repo and reverse repo amounts accepted in LAF auctions.
• What’s not included: the auction table has no standing facilities (SDF, MSF), so it is not RBI’s total net injection.
• Rates on busy days: on days with several auctions, the stored cut-off rate is not an average, so it isn’t published.

Money

• Reserve money: reserve money, currency in circulation and bankers’ deposits, weekly. Bankers’ deposits move mechanically with the CRR.
• M3, fortnightly:
  • RBI’s merger-inclusive series from 14 Jul 2023 (HDFC with HDFC Bank); the earlier basis before that.
  • Year-on-year growth uses the merger-inclusive series where it has a year of history.

Credit

• Non-food bank credit by sector from 2019, with y/y growth.
• Avoiding the HDFC merger jump (1 Jul 2023):
  • Agriculture, industry, services and personal loans use RBI’s merger-adjusted series.
  • Other sectors have no adjusted series, so their growth for Jul 2023–Jun 2024 is left blank.

External

• Reserves: weekly composition (FCA, gold, SDR, IMF reserve tranche), the gold share, and import cover. Import cover = reserves ÷ average monthly merchandise imports over the previous 12 months, counting a month’s imports from about two weeks after it ends.
• Reserves against short-term external debt (original maturity), quarterly.
• RBI’s FX intervention: net purchases, and the net forward book by tenor.
• Balance of payments: quarterly, as RBI prints it.
• REER and NEER: RBI’s 40-currency, trade-weighted, base 2015-16 = 100.

Government securities

• T-bill yields: secondary-market, by residual maturity. These are not auction cut-offs.
• Market borrowing: centre and states, cumulative from April each year, gross and net. Verified: the series resets in the first week of April.
• Auction results:
  • T-bill auctions (cut-off yields and bid cover for 91, 182 and 364 days) from Apr 2019. The March 2020 cash management bills are in the Data bank (instrument = cmb) but not in the weekly bundle.
  • Dated G-sec auctions (cut-off price and yield, bid cover, devolvement on primary dealers) from Apr 2019. Rejected auctions show no cut-off.
  • State development loans (rbi/sdl/*), every state and UT auction from Apr 2019:
    • by auction day: notified and raised amounts, cut-off yield weighted by the amount allotted, the allotment-weighted years to maturity (weekly cut-offs move with the tenor mix, so read the two together), bid cover, number of states and issues
    • by state and financial year: amount raised, weighted cut-off, number of issues
    • An SDL spread over G-secs waits for the G-sec curve (see docs/DATA_GAPS.md, bond sources).
  • Older release formats (parser v2, 2026-10-02): blank header cells in 2019-20 T-bill tables; a missing <tr> tag; two issues of one state in one release (told apart by coupon or tenor, never overwritten); footnote marks; price and yield swapped in some 2019 G-sec releases (the larger figure is the price).

Checks (2026-10-02)

Reserves

All 350 overlapping weeks also agree with the older rbi_dbie_forex_reserves dataset within US$0.01 mn.

Money and rates

Repo changes

These match RBI’s decisions, allowing for the print lag; the April cut took effect on 9 Apr. They also agree with BIS.

Balance of payments

• Current account + capital account + errors and omissions = overall balance within US$0.001 bn in every quarter.
• The change in reserves offsets the overall balance exactly from 2000-Q3. Before that, IMF credit also financed the balance (the 1991 crisis), so the two differ.

Policy and auctions (RBI-publications source, 2026-10-02)

• Policy rates:
  • India Data Hub’s weekly policy-rate series match on 10,255 of 10,257 weeks. The two exceptions are CRR in Jun 2002, where later Handbook editions re-dated the cut.
  • The RBI home page’s current rates all match.
• MPC: the latest meeting (the 62nd, 5 Aug 2026) is a 6–0 hold with a neutral stance. Known splits reproduce: Aug 2019 4–2, Oct 2024 5–1, Dec 2024 4–2, Jun 2025 5–1.
• Lending and deposit rates: Aug 2026 fresh WALR is 8.61, outstanding WALR 8.96, and Sep median MCLR 8.61, matching the release text.
• Auctions:
  • 10-year G-sec auction on 25 Sep 2026: cut-off yield 7.1450%, no devolvement.
  • All 527 T-bill auctions agree with India Data Hub within 1 bp.
  • Nine 2019–21 auctions (three each of G-sec, T-bill and SDL) were checked field by field against the release text, e.g. 7.63% GS 2059 on 23 Aug 2019: cut-off 108.40 / 7.0002%, accepted Rs 4,992.958 crore.
  • SDL gross borrowing by financial year from the parsed auctions: FY20 Rs 6.35 lakh crore, FY21 7.99, FY22 7.02, FY23 7.58, FY24 10.07, FY25 10.73, FY26 12.76. FY24 matches RBI’s State Finances report (Rs 10.07 trillion, up 32.8%: our FY24/FY23 ratio is 1.328, so FY23 matches too); the other years agree with RBI’s figures as recalled, not re-fetched.
  • Audit rules loosened for the 2019–22 history (each documented with a real release in the Data bank audit config): accepted amount up to 2× notified (green shoe; 8 G-sec and 4 SDL releases print no green-shoe note); SDL weighted-average yield up to 100 bp from cut-off (Mar–Apr 2020 printed gaps up to 78 bp); T-bill price-to-yield check allows prices printed to 2 decimals.

Licence

RBI’s website disclaimer says “All Rights Reserved” and asks for permission to cache, deep-link or frame the site.

• What the site does: publishes statistics and derived measures with “Source: Reserve Bank of India”. It republishes no RBI documents.
• Owner decision (2026-10-02): approved. RBI statistics are public data.

Lags

RBI’s DBIE tables load later than the Weekly Statistical Supplement:

• weekly reserve money runs to Dec 2025
• LAF auctions to Jun 2026
• the balance of payments to Sep 2025

Forex reserves, M3, call rates and borrowing are current. Every bundle shows its own last date.