The monetary policy committee of Reserve Bank of India, headed by RBI Governor Urjit Patel has kept the repo rate unchanged at 6% in its review meeting held earlier today. Repo rate is also known as short-term lending rate. It is the rate at which RBI gives loans to the smaller banks. Reverse Repo Rate has been kept unchanged at 5.75%.
Talking of the other rates, the committee kept CRR (Cash Reserve Ratio) unchanged at 4%, however, it did cut down SLR (Statutory Liquidity Ratio) by 50 base points. The new rate of SLR stands at 19.5%.
RBI has predicted the risk factor to be evenly managed and it has cut down the projection of real GVA growth to 6.7%. The same was earlier predicted to be 7.3%.
A lot of economic analysts and enthusiasts were optimistic for the rate cut under the current monitoring policy review meeting. However, RBI seems to have prioritised other tasks before addressing the rate cut issue. In June this year, the GDP growth dipped to 5.7% from 7.3% in the September quarter last year.