Reserve Bank of India

The profile

The Reserve Bank of India is India's central bank. Its own account dates its establishment to 1 April 1935 under the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, records that the central office was first in Kolkata and moved permanently to Mumbai in 1937, and notes that although the bank was originally privately owned it has been fully owned by the Government of India since nationalisation in 1949. The preamble it prints describes its basic functions as 'to regulate the issue of Bank notes and keeping of reserves with a view to securing monetary stability in India and generally to operate the currency and credit system of the country to its advantage; to have a modern monetary policy framework to meet the challenge of an increasingly complex economy, to maintain price stability while keeping in mind the objective of growth'. Its affairs are governed by a central board appointed by the government for four years, with the Governor and not more than four Deputy Governors as full-time official directors alongside ten government-nominated directors. On this beat it is the issuer of the e-rupee and the operator of the interface through which its wholesale central bank digital currency reaches market infrastructure. Governor Sanjay Malhotra told the Global Fintech Fest on 10 September 2026 that the bank's 'tokenisation initiatives including Certificates of Deposit issued through the Unified Markets Interface using wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) are helping us understand the potential future architecture of financial markets', and announced in the same paragraph that 'Today, we take the next step in our tokenisation journey as we unveil the tokenisation of corporate bonds with settlement through CBDC as a joint initiative with SEBI and with the involvement of other stakeholders.' The bank published no press release of its own about the launch, and its retail programmable CBDC pilots run separately, covering targeted government benefit transfers.