The Reserve Bank of India Thursday decided to continue policy support for a durable and broad-based recovery in the economy and kept the key policy repo rate unchanged at 4 per cent ensuring a whole host of home, auto and personal loans remain cheap for borrowers.
Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends money to banks.
Announcing the monetary policy committee decision, Governor Shaktikanta Das said the private consumption continued to trail the pre-pandemic levels and cut the economic growth projection for the financial year 2022-23 to 7.8 per cent from 9.2 per cent in the current year ending March 31.
The Monetary Policy Committee has, unanimously, opted to maintain the repo rate at 4.00 per cent. The committee also opted to maintain an accommodative stance in order to support economic growth and recovery, Das said.
"The fact that the repo rates remain unchanged is good for home loan borrowers as the floating retail loan rates, which are directly linked to external benchmark repo rates, will continue at what are the lowest levels in the last two decades. A continuation of this low-interest rate regime supports the overall environment of affordability for some more time and is very welcome," said Anuj Puri, chairman of ANAROCK Group.
The RBI also left the reverse repo rate at 3.35 per cent.
It is the rate at which the central bank borrows money from the banks to suck out the excess liquidity in the system.
Experts expected an increase in reverse repo rate to reduce the surplus liquidity into markets given to tackle the pandemic.
However, the MPC decided not to do so and allow some more time for the economic recovery to broad-based.
There is some loss of economic momentum due to the third pandemic wave and demand for contact intensive sector is mute, the Governor said.
On inflation, the Governor said hardening of global crude oil prices presented upside risk to inflation but hoped it would broadly remain within the tolerance band of the central bank at 2-6 per cent.
He retained the retail inflation forecast for the year 2021-22 at 5.3 per cent. The CPI inflation is forecasted for 2022-23 was brought down to 4.5 per cent.
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