Reserve Bank forms academic advisory council for supervisory college

The College of Supervisors has been operational in a limited way since May last year, but it is now being fully operationalised

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has set up an academic advisory council with former deputy governor N S Vishwanathan as the chairperson to advise the full-time director of the central bank’s College of Supervisors (CoS).

Members of the council include Arijit Basu, former managing director of State Bank of India (SBI); Paresh Sukthankar, former deputy MD at HDFC Bank; S Raghunath, professor at IIM-Bangalore; Tathagata Bandyopadhyay, professor at IIM-Ahmedabad; and Subrata Sarkar professor at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai. Rabi Narayan Mishra, former executive director of the RBI, has been named as the director of the body.

The CoS has been operational in a limited way since May last year, but it is now being fully operationalised. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had first spoken about setting up a CoS in November 2019, partly in response to the Punjab and Maharashtra Bank Co-operative Bank crisis.  

The idea was to further strengthen supervision over regulated entities, and to augment and reinforce supervisory skills among its regulatory and supervisory staff both at entry level and on a continuous basis. 

The council’s role will be to “identify areas where skill building/up-skilling are requir­ed, plan and develop curricula of all programmes, benchmark the programmes with international standards/­best practices, and develop appropriate teaching methods, etc.”, the central bank said in a statement.