On 11 December 2018, Das was appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) for a three-year term. His predecessor Urjit Patel had resigned the day before. Das received an extension in December 2021 for a period of three years. As RBI governor, Das served as the
ex-officio chairperson of the
Monetary Policy Committee of the central bank.
Responses Das's appointment as RBI governor received mostly positive responses, with
DBS Bank's head of markets for India at Singapore, Ashish Vaidya, saying that previous governors of the RBI with an
IAS background, such as
Y. Venugopal Reddy and
Duvvuri Subbarao, had been successful and that Das's "cordial relations with the government [...] [would] likely help policy negotiations."
S. S. Mundra, a former
deputy governor of the RBI, said Das was a "good and balanced choice" for RBI governorship and had "a good understanding of the whole of the financial sector both from the ministry and also in his interactions with the RBI." A former
Governor of the Reserve Bank of India,
C. Rangarajan, said Das had "experience in economic affairs" and would "make a good governor". Reactions of the markets was also positive, with
BSE SENSEX gaining 629points and
NIFTY 50 increasing by 188points. On the other hand,
Nobel laureate and professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Abhijit Banerjee, said Das's appointment posed a lot of "frightening" questions on governance of autonomous public institutions. He also became the subject of widespread commentary and jokes on social media. On
Twitter, some users joked about his MA in History with quips wondering if he would turn the RBI "into history" and asking him history-quiz questions like the date of the
Battle of Haldighati.
Google Trends data indicated that searches related to Das's educational qualifications surged immediately following the announcement of his appointment.
Initiatives In March 2020, as the
COVID-19 pandemic disrupted economic activity, the RBI under Das took a sequence of emergency actions to preserve credit flows and inject
system liquidity. The central bank's
Monetary Policy Committee held an emergency meeting on 27 March 2020 and cut the policy
repo rate by 75
basis points, including a 3-month
moratorium on term loans. By May 2020, the central bank had cumulatively reduced the repo rate by 115 bps over two months, injected liquidity equivalent to 8.7% of India's GDP, and introduced targeted relief to strengthen transmission and financial stability. One of Das's first major challenges was addressing the
liquidity crisis in the
non-banking financial company (NBFC) sector following the
IL&FS default in 2018. In October 2021, the RBI, issued a scale-based regulatory framework for NBFCs, reorganising supervision according to size, activities and systemic importance and imposing enhanced governance, disclosure and prudential standards for larger NBFCs, along with stricter norms to curb excessive risk-taking. The RBI continued to prioritise digital payment infrastructure under Das.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) became the dominant retail payment method by volume and value, based on
NPCI statistics. According to the
International Monetary Fund, UPI has averaged growth rates of 160% annually since its launch in 2016. By mid-2024, over 14 billion transactions per month were recorded by UPI and transaction values regularly surpassing ₹20 trillion. == Awards ==