This refers to Subir Roy's column "The RBI gets it right" (Value For Money, April 9). The last few years have seen the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) fighting a lone battle to perform its mandated role as efficiently as it would have enjoyed doing. Most of the governors and deputy governors who were in charge during the past decade and a half, did understand the expectations from RBI once they started operating from Mint Street. But the hostility of lower-rung finance ministry officials for extraneous reasons made their life difficult.
This resulted in the evolution of three power centres - RBI, its governor and the finance ministry - taking different positions on important policy issues. It is comforting to see that Raghuram Rajan has been able to assert leadership and co-ordinate among these three divergent centres. His willingness to discard what is not relevant to the Indian context and to prepare RBI to meet the new challenges from the government gives one hope that the central bank is getting back on the right track quickly.
M G Warrier Thiruvananthapuram
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