Monetary Policy

With Exchange Rate Pressures Easing, RBI Missed a Chance to Rebuild Monetary Space

After intense depreciation pressure, RBI succeeded in stabilizing the rupee exchange rate by taking capital flow measures in its June policy. This opened the possibility for RBI prioritizing inflation targeting in today’s policy to create space for rate cuts to deal with future shocks but RBI missed the opportunity to do so and bulwark its credibility.

Mridul Saggar

Review of the MPC Decision: The Fine Print on Outperformance

Behind the policy pause, easing inflation, stronger external buffers and broader investment point to a more resilient economy.

Ashima Goyal

RBI Holds Rates, Real Rate Debate Stays Unresolved

The RBI’s pause is defensible, but near-zero real rates sit uneasily with 6.7% growth, external risks and fragile household demand.

Dhananjay Sinha

Patience Will Help the RBI Make the Right Call

Resilient growth and an inflation undershoot give the RBI room to wait as oil volatility, the rupee and global rates cloud the outlook.

Indranil Pan

The Importance of Fiscal Prudence: Lessons from the Yen’s Depreciation

The yen got hammered, and the takeaway for India is that strong fundamentals and domestic debt alone cannot protect a currency. What India needs is to focus on fiscal discipline.

Deepa Vasudevan

A Little Help for Japan and the Return of Managed Currencies

Reported US support for the yen is more than a market operation. It signals the return of coordinated currency management as economic statecraft.

R. Gurumurthy

The MPC Must Show the Way Back to 4%

Benign core inflation supports the case for waiting, but the MPC must say how long headline inflation may remain above 4%.

Kalyan Ram

Columnists

Michael Debabrata Patra

Michael Patra is an economist and former RBI Deputy Governor.

Abheek Barua

Abheek is an Independent Economist and the Former Chief Economist at HDFC Bank.

Ajay Srivastava

Ajay Srivastava is the founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative.

Vijay Chauhan

Vijay Singh Chauhan, a former IRS official, is a Senior Visiting Fellow at ICPP, Ashoka University

Dhananjay Sinha

Dhananjay, a D-School alum, is CEO and Co-Head of Equities at Systematix Group.

Kirti Tarang Pande

Kriti is a psychologist specialising in mental health, org behaviour, and brand strategy

Srinath Sridharan

Srinath is an author, corporate advisor, and independent director on corporate boards.

Sharmila Chavaly

Ex-civil servant Chavaly held key Railways, Finance roles; specialises in infra & PPPs

Nilanjan Banik

Nilanjan Banik, Professor at Mahindra University, specialises in trade and development economics.

Rahul Ghosh

Rahul Ghosh is a banking and risk expert.

Rajesh Mahapatra

Rajesh Mahapatra is the former Editor of The Press Trust of India

Krishnadevan V

Krishnadevan is Editorial Director at BasisPoint Insight.

Dev Chandrasekhar

Chandra advises companies on big-picture narratives on strategy and markets.

Kalyan Ram

Kalyan Ram co-founded Cogencis. He now leads BasisPoint Insight.

R. Gurumurthy

Gurumurthy is an ex-central banker who handled markets, and later, financial stability for RBI.

Arvind Mayaram

Arvind Mayaram, former Finance Secretary, is Chairman of the Institute of Development Studies, Jaipur.

Vivek Kaul

Vivek Kaul is a writer and an economic commentator.

The Bureau

Equities Edge Higher After RBI Pause; Rupee, Bonds Gain

RBI Holds Repo Rate at 5.25%, Retains Neutral Stance, Seeks More Time

DGFT Notifies Rules for Inventory-Based E-commerce Exports

Text of post-policy press conference of the RBI

Highlights of Comments by RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra at Post-Policy Press Meet

RBI Reopens Door For Urban Cooperative Bank Licences After 22-Year Freeze

RBI: Raises FY27 GDP Growth Forecast by 10 Bps to 6.7%, Sees Balanced Risks

Highlights of Monetary Policy Statements by RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra

The Foster Mother of Lodhi Garden

RBI Has Bought Time; India Must Now Earn Its Dollars

The RBI has bought stability with borrowed dollars. India must use this costly reprieve to boost growth, raise exports, retain capital, and restore investor confidence.

Kalyan Ram

The Mirage of Market Exchange Rates

Market exchange rates can distort economic rankings. PPP offers a different lens, showing how much larger India’s economy appears when measured by what money can buy.

Michael Debabrata Patra

Are the By-Election Results Out of Syllabus?

Bankipur, Datia and Manjalpur do not make a national wave, but they expose fresh limits to the BJP’s centralised electoral playbook.

Rajesh Mahapatra

Anatomy of an Upset in a Bastion: Top 10 Reasons Why BJP Lost Bankipur

How Prashant Kishor breached a BJP stronghold held for three decades, turning voter fatigue, local grievances and a weak candidate into one of Bihar’s biggest political upsets yet.

Amitabh Tiwari

The MPC Is Flying with a New Instrument Panel

Rebased data and supply shocks have blurred the RBI’s view, making patience and observed inflation spillovers central to policy.

Gaura Sen Gupta

Monetary Policy

RBI Should Close the Door on Easing with a Stance Change

The August policy need not deliver a hike. It should deliver recognition that India should not meet a harder monetary world with an easing bias left ajar.

BasisPoint Groupthink

The Fragile Federation Next Door

Pakistan survives on external props, not internal cohesion—can a federation held together by the Army outlast its own fault lines?

Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd)

Nestlé’s Investor Slides Tell a Bigger Story

The FMCG sell-off reflects more than rising costs: weak household income, soft staples demand and fading pricing power are now squeezing margins.

Dhananjay Sinha

Masterclass with Michael Patra

Lessons From India’s Inflation Targeting Decade

After a decade tested by a pandemic and war, Michael Patra distils four lessons from India’s flexible inflation-targeting framework.

Michael Debabrata Patra

Tearing Down the Currency Wall

Most of the world seems to misunderstand why global capital is not financing the developing world’s climate transition. The real problem lies in the structure of price formation, which policymakers can best address by focusing on three key priorities.

Jayant Sinha

Monetary Policy

What Would Actually Make the RBI Hike?

Markets have largely priced in a pause at the August MPC meeting. The more consequential question is what comes after — and what it would take to get there.

Radhika Piplani

Yen Intervention Raises Spectre of a Plaza Accord Remake

Coordinated yen intervention may check Japan’s currency slide, but a carry-trade unwind could amplify volatility across stretched global markets.

Sanjay Mansabdar

India’s ₹1.43 Trillion Margin Boom Carries a Korean Warning

India’s MTF book is near a record, turning retail participation into a test of leverage, liquidity and forced selling.

Krishnadevan V

National Politics After Jantar Mantar: The Youth Question Returns

The NEET leak protests exposed a political landscape that is structurally imbalanced with an old guard leading a young nation. As parties in the opposition and in power scramble to address their young electorate, it is clear no one can afford to take the youth vote for granted any more.

Amitabh Tiwari

Monetary Policy

One More Pause Before a Hike

The RBI can pause in August, but resilient growth, uneven rainfall and tight banking liquidity are preparing the ground for rate hikes.

Dipanwita Mazumdar

India Needs a Retail-Funded Deep-Tech Revolution

Government finances are constrained, and foreign venture firms can be fickle. India needs to tap its deep pool of retail investors to power its deep-tech ambitions.

R. Sridharan

BasisPoint Groupthink

Fed’s Warsh Says Play the Ball, Markets Call Foul

Warsh wants investors to trade the data rather than the Fed. The post-meeting yield curve exposed the cost of asking markets to price policy without a visible reaction function.

Kalyan Ram

Briefing

Big Mac at 40 Explains What Currencies Really Buy

The burger made PPP tangible. Forty years on, it still shows why a cheap currency need not be mispriced or poised for a rebound.

Kalyan Ram

The Central Banking Desk

Fed Holds as Dissent Becomes the Signal

A 9–3 hold, three votes for a hike and a sharply steeper Treasury curve leave September live even as Warsh refuses to pre-commit.

BasisPoint Insight

Beyond Rankings: NITI Aayog’s Investment Friendliness Index

States are being ranked on how attractive a destination they are for investors and businesses alike and rather than see this as a competition, they would do well to learn from each other, adopt proven reforms, and avoid common hurdles.

Ishtiyaque Ahmed

Simpler Applications Can Lift Welfare Benefit Uptake

Delhi’s widow pension scheme shows how paperwork shuts out eligible women and why practical help works better than information campaigns alone.

Amitrajeet A. Batabyal*

The Big Mac Index at 40 Is More Metaphor Than Measure

The Big Mac Index made purchasing power parity accessible, but local costs and persistent currency gaps make it an imperfect guide to fair value.

V Thiagarajan

The Empty Space Between Growth and Chaos

India's economy hums with activity, yet something feels missing. Perhaps our dysfunction is a different kind of structure, waiting to be understood rather than fixed.

Phynix

Opinion

When Eminence Is Not Enough

HDFC Bank’s disclosure shows why eminent boards must be judged by their scepticism, regulatory clarity and willingness to intervene.

R. Gurumurthy

Geopolitics

Blumenthal’s Tariff Should Push India, China and Russia into a Cosy Corner

The US Senate's bipartisan push for punitive tariffs on countries buying Russian oil is more than a trade measure. The move presents a rare opportunity for India, China and Russia to deepen strategic cooperation and reshape the emerging global order.

Rajesh Ramachandran

India’s Defence Drones Face the Scale Test

India’s drone ecosystem has moved beyond prototypes. Global relevance now depends on secure supply chains, common standards and production scale.

Prakash Nanda

RBI’s Tightrope Narrows as Oil, Rupee and Inflation Risks Rise

Oil volatility, rupee pressure and uncertain inflation leave the RBI little room as it balances price stability, liquidity and growth.

Madhavankutty G

Beyond NEET: Where the Education System Has Truly Failed Our Youth

The NEET controversy is only a symptom of a deeper failure: an education system that selects a few but does too little to prepare millions of young Indians for productive lives.

Shubhranshu

Unlocking India's Idle Gold: How to Turn Household Wealth into Productive Capital

Indians love their gold, but the current account deficit does not. It is time for policymakers to look beyond asking Indians to postpone gold purchases and actively put this dormant wealth to active use.

K. S Sujit

Sachin Pande

India Needs Trade Stress Tests Before It Signs More Trade Deals

India’s trade is increasingly concentrated across a handful of markets, commodities and supply chains, leaving exports, jobs and industrial clusters exposed to external shocks.

Sagari Gupta

The Stress Test That Should Worry Debt Investors

SEBI stress tests show worsening liquidity in debt funds. Is the corporate debt safety net strong enough for the next market shock?

Indra Chourasia

Is SBI's AT1 Issuance A Blip Or Are Banks Back on The Bond Street?

Whether SBI's issue points to a sustained revival remains to be seen, but the data increasingly points to a structural shift where domestic bond markets have become a funding option rather than a necessity.

Dehuti Jani

Why Compute Is Becoming the New Constraint on Economic Growth

AI is making compute the new driver of economic growth, shifting policy priorities from traditional infrastructure to digital capacity and energy.

Anuj Agarwal

Trump’s New Tariffs Are an Opportunity to Fight Back

Once again, President Donald Trump is subverting domestic and international law in an effort to seize a larger fraction of global value and supply chains, and harming the US economy in the process. The longer that businesses and other governments avoid standing up to him, the greater the disaster that awaits us all.

Joseph E. Stiglitz

Beware the Debt-Fuelled AI Boom

Until recently, the AI boom was funded by equity. But now, debt—a lot of it opaquely structured—is increasingly powering the build-out.

R. Sridharan

India Economy is Growing, But Data Gives a Reality Check on Youth Employment

Low levels of education, limited skills, and concentration in the lowest earnings percentile – these are only some of the issues that ail India’s youth. Further, the gender divide is real, and wide. These factors are keeping the youth from being meaningful partners in India’s growth story.

Smita Roy Trivedi

Abhiman Das

The Hidden Reason SEBI Split India's Market Close

SEBI’s closing auction makes benchmark prices cleaner and settlement sharper, even as three different closing times risk making the market less intuitive for small investors.

Krishnadevan V

Cross-Ownership Reforms in Indian Aviation: The Legal Framework and the Alternatives

Could safer alternatives revive competition in Indian aviation without dismantling the firewalls between airlines and airports?

Sharmila Chavaly

The Brand-Building Bypass

Digital commerce has made scale purchasable. But is this coming at the cost of brand trust? And how should companies calibrate the scale vs brand building trade-offs?

Minari Shah

India Faces Fresh Tariff Risk as US Senate Advances Russia Sanctions Bill

The bill gives US President broad discretion over whether to impose tariffs and which countries to target.

Ajay Srivastava

Khelo India Khelo: What Gen Z Protests Tell Us About the Lure of Easy Money

Easy money schemes thrive because young Indians face stagnant incomes and scarce quality jobs. The protests reveal the economic frustration beneath the politics.

Vivek Kaul

While Carmakers Argue, This Supplier is Cashing In

Motherson Sumi Wiring India shows how a “powertrain agnostic” auto supplier can turn copper spikes and messy EV timing into a still high-return story.

Krishnadevan V

AI Layoffs Came Too Soon;The Rehiring Wave Shows Why

Companies that cut jobs on AI promises are rehiring as hidden costs, quality failures and the limits of machine judgement become clearer.

Chirayu Sharma

The Morning Edge

Asian Markets Turn Cautious Ahead of Fed, Big Tech Earnings

Here’s your quick read to start the day: a chatty, no-fuss look at overnight moves, the big story, what’s on the docket, and the tickers you need to watch.

Nandinee Keluskar

When Cockroaches Marched, Change Started Crawling Our Way

A generation dismissed as entitled took to the streets and made a government buckle. But will replacing one minister repair a system where trust has been steadily eroded?

Phynix

The Cost of Not Building Data Centers

Capital inflows into data centers have generated significant pushback in the US, with projects worth at least $85 billion being cancelled. This underscores a shortcoming of decision-making, for while markets are efficient at pricing the costs of doing something they are very inefficient at pricing the costs of not doing it.

Vittorio Quaglione

When Functional Regulation Meets Formidable Institutions

What follows when a regulator's own demonstrated philosophy and a holding company’s own demonstrated history are placed side by side.

Chandrika Soyantar

July Fed Decision Is a Cliffhanger as Warsh Keeps Markets Guessing

The data favour a hold, but markets cannot rule out a credibility-building rate increase and the financial instability that could follow.

Yield Scribe

When Taxes Become the Hidden Architects of Financial Innovation

Taxes do more than raise revenue. They shape financial innovation, influence capital allocation and quietly determine how households and firms invest.

R. Gurumurthy

When an Exam Protest Becomes a Political Test

India’s NEET protests have outgrown the exam, exposing a deeper crisis of youth opportunity, political accountability and trust in institutions.

Kalyan Ram

Basis Life

Why the Freedom Movement's Favourite Photograph Refuses to Die

Why do Indian protests still end with leaders being carried to police vans? A wry look at colonial symbolism in the age of social media.

Krishnadevan V

The Wrath of the Middle Class

The protests over the NEET paper leaks are no longer just about an examination, they reflect the growing disillusionment of the middle class that once formed the BJP's core support base.

Rajesh Ramachandran

When Journalism Became ANI’s Weakness Against OpenAI

The Delhi High Court did not reject copyright in news reports. Instead, it held that facts remain public, expression alone is protected, and ANI failed to show infringement.

Arshad Hussain

The Government Earned ₹1.29 Trillion Taxing Equities. Why Will It Let It Go?

The case for abolishing long term capital gains tax ignores a simple reality: the government earned ₹1.29 trillion from it in 2024-25. Who fills that gap if the tax disappears?

Vivek Kaul

HDFC Bank Is Still Paying for a Merger It Closed Three Years Ago

Profit is growing while margin shrinks. The gap is the cost of the HDFC Ltd debt, most of which matures in 2026. The repayment window is now open.

Dev Chandrasekhar

US Section 301 Tariffs May Face Challenges Over Unequal Treatment

Washington’s forced-labour tariffs appear designed less to punish violations than to preserve recent trade deals, creating unequal remedies that may invite legal challenge.

Ajay Srivastava

One-Star Democracy: How Gen Z Built a New Protest OS

Institutions that continue treating dissent as a traditional top-down affair are responding to today's protests with yesterday's interface.

Kirti Tarang Pande

Why Public Debt Is Important for Monetary Policy Transmission

India’s debt is consolidating, but recent bond-market moves show that global shocks, bank-dominated investor composition, and unsynchronised borrowing design can blunt the transmission of rate changes.

Deba Prasad Rath

Rewanth Raichooti

India’s MSMEs Need Ecosystems, Not Just Incentives

India’s 63 million MSMEs could become key engines for jobs and exports—if policy shifts from isolated firms to specialised industrial ecosystems.

Nilanjan Banik

When the Investment Vehicle Becomes the Risk

A leveraged ETF’s collapse shows why investors must examine not only what they own but also the financial architecture through which they invest.

R. Gurumurthy

Market Depth Can Turn Rainfall Shocks into Smaller Price Spikes

Dense agricultural market networks can sharply reduce the impact of extreme rainfall on tomato, onion and potato inflation.

Ashima Goyal

Anas Khan

Trump's Generic Drug Tariff Threat: Two Years Is a Long Time

Indian companies supply 47% of all generic prescriptions dispensed in the US, making India the country's largest source of affordable generic medicines.

Ajay Srivastava

India's Healthcare Crisis: Why Insurance Coverage Fails the Insured

Insurance covers 46% but reimburses just 4.3%. For the poor, lost wages from illness prove deadlier than medical bills. This invisible crisis demands policy action.

D. Tripati Rao

Rishu Kumar

GST Growth Masks a Widening State Revenue Divide

GST has delivered impressive national collections, but state-wise data reveal a tax base increasingly concentrated in a few industrialised regions.

Rajesh Kumar*

One Exam's Lost Credibility is Becoming a System-Wide Trust Question

India’s student NEET protests reveal how social systems, like companies, must navigate trust, legitimacy and influence.

Minari Shah

RBI’s Technology Maker-Checker Conundrum

Beyond the remediated BANK.IN security episode lies a larger governance challenge as AI rewrites the economics of institutional assurance.

Srinath Sridharan

Anand Venkatanarayanan

India’s Financial Reforms Risk Becoming Policy Vapourware Again

India excels at headline reforms, but crucial financial sector overhauls keep stalling. Delaying invisible safeguards today could make the next crisis far costlier.

Utsav Saksena

India’s FTA Push Needs Stronger Factories, Not Just Better Market Access

India’s growing FTA network has expanded market access, but exports and global value chain integration remain weak, exposing the limits of trade deals without industrial reform.

Surendar Singh

Financial Inclusion 2.0 Must Move from Access to Usage

India has expanded formal banking access at scale, but dormant accounts, limited usage and weak financial literacy show that the next phase must deepen customer engagement and improve service quality.

K. Srinivasa Rao

Climate Policy Needs Carbon Pricing, Not Just Green Subsidies

New research finds modest global carbon taxes outperform green subsidies, while uneven climate policies impose significant economic costs.

Amitrajeet A. Batabyal*

Rupee’s Real Fault Line Lies Beyond Domestic Policy

Domestic measures can bolster the rupee temporarily, but costly global funding and attractive US assets remain the deeper sources of pressure.

Dhiraj Nim

Don’t Overestimate America and China’s Importance

Some commentators on international affairs seem to think that “the West” and the BRICS+ do not really matter; only the United States and China do. This is a simplistic framing.

Jim O’Neill