New Delhi: It is nearly a year since Shaktikanta Das assumed the hot seat on 11 December, 2018, at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), coming in at much turbulent times – a doddering economy, the sudden exit of his predecessor Urijit Patel and a question mark over the central bank’s independence. It did not help that the Opposition and the media made much of his being a former bureaucrat and a history graduate at that, though from the much esteemed St Stephen's.

Whether history judges him kindly remains to be seen, but the man and the governor has so far weathered his critics and the exigencies of his office ably.

Today, Das and his team at RBI chose to keep the repo rate unchanged. It wasn’t so expected and is a break after five successive cuts in the key policy rate. No matter how small an event, it reinforces the popular conviction – that the governor’s seat has a DNA of its own. The Indian Administrative Service officer from the Tamil Nadu cadre has only strengthened the conviction. The RBI headquarter in Mumbai’s Fort area has a magic to it and Das has done nothing to betray it.

That he has managed to soothe his critics and the market along with bankers, investors, and corporates while keeping the Centre happy is no mean feat at all.

Since Das became the governor, the RBI’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has cut rates by a cumulative 135 basis points. One could argue this is as much as a country’s central bank could do, particularly in a country where transmission remains a work-in-progress.

Das has adopted an accommodative stance, being open to more reductions, and prioritised growth over keeping a lid on inflation. It has helped that currency markets have mostly stayed calm and domestic inflation low, barring the latter rearing its head once again after years of being benign.

The tag of a former bureaucrat came back to haunt Das as the RBI agreed to pay a record $24 billion to the exchequer in August – a long standing demand of the Centre as it grapples with falling tax collection. This was a first of its kind and the largest such transfer by India’s central bank.

But Das has been his own man, his ears glued to the ground. It has reflected in his media interactions which had shrunk to minimal in Patel’s time. Fifteen minutes is all the media would get with the RBI board and Patel after every policy meet. Any other interaction was a rarity.

Das might not enjoy Raghuram Rajan’s rock star status but he has kept the two-way channels with the public and the media well-lubricated. As he was in his days at North Block when he was joint secretary in the finance ministry and later secretary in department of economic affairs, Das hasn’t shied from speaking his mind, the status of the RBI governor probably only lending to the inner belief. That’s what it has done many a governors.

"The chief of US Fed (Jerome Powell) has a political science background, the incoming chief of the European Central Bank and former IMF president Christine Lagarde has a legal background and the chief of the Bank of Japan (Haruhiko Kuroda) has a civil service background," Das said in September at the India Today Conclave. He was responding to a question whether his academic qualification weighed him down as the governor.

Das argued, "When it comes to policymaking, whether you did a particular course 35 or 40 years ago, I think it is not relevant as it would appear. I think what matters more is your awareness, your grip on what is happening in the real economy, the kind of experience you have had in your entire professional life."

And this experience tells.

When the National Democratic Alliance government announced the bold step of raising US dollar funds by selling sovereign bonds in overseas markets, Das opposed it. He is said to have argued against the move, saying that the cost benefit would be against the sovereign.

Das, like his predecessor, has also stayed away from interfering with India’s exchange rate even as some in the government and export lobbies have complained about the rupee’s competitiveness.

But his job now is tougher than ever before.

A low growth and high inflation cannot be a comforting thought for any central bank governor. Growth is at a six-year low, falling to 4.5% in the September quarter, while inflation for October rose to 4.62%, against RBI’s own mid-range target of 4%. Most economists expect India to now grow at closer to 5.0% for fiscal 2019-20, the lowest since the global financial crisis in 2008-09.

A rate cut was almost a given in today’s RBI policy meet, but Das ducked it, probably earning only more pats in the process, given RBI’s avowed focus on inflation and as prices rear again.

India’s financial market is in turmoil, given the collapse of IL&FS, DHFL, and the Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative Bank. How he navigates that quagmire will be one more interesting trapeze act to watch.

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