RBI awarded digital transformation Award 2025 for digital initiatives

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The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has been selected for the Digital Transformation Award 2025 by Central Banking, London, UK. The central bank was awarded for its digital initiatives—Pravaah and Sarthi—which were developed by its in-house developer team.

 

Sarthi, launched in January 2023, digitised RBI’s internal workflows, enabling its employees to store and share documents securely, improving record management, and increasing the options for data analysis through reports and dashboards.

 

The awards committee noted how these digital initiatives have reduced the use of paper-based submissions, thus transforming RBI’s internal and external processes.

 

In the second stage of the transformation process, launched in May 2024 as Pravaah, a digitised means was created for external users to submit regulatory applications to the RBI. Documents submitted and processed through the portal are plugged into the Sarthi database, where they can be handled digitally across RBI offices, with centralised cybersecurity systems and digital tracking.

 

Pravaah has so far allowed more than 70 different regulatory applications to be digitised, supporting the work of nine RBI departments. Between its launch in May and the end of 2024, over 2,000 applications had been filed through the system, marking an 80 per cent increase in monthly applications, partly due to the increased ease of use provided by the portal.

 

The statement said that the successful adoption of Sarthi is partly due to the team's work in putting in place the necessary support structures. The IT team engaged in a lengthy collaborative process with staff to understand their needs before building the system and appointed senior nodal officers from each department to champion the upgrade.

 

Overall, Sarthi has helped the RBI boost operational efficiency by automating processes. It allows task and performance tracking, improved collaboration, and integration with other RBI systems. Where previously RBI’s many departments relied on a fragmented mix of manual and digital processes, Sarthi creates a unified global repository for the central bank’s information.

 

Moreover, RBI’s cybersecurity specialists are able to continuously monitor the system for suspicious activity.