After the Central Board of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) approved the transfer of Rs 1,76,051 crore to Centre, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Tuesday said that the central government now "usurps a huge windfall" from RBI.
"Urjit Patel & Viral Acharya held the fort. They were forced to leave. The fort was breached. The Govt of India now usurps a huge windfall from the RBI going contrary to what the central bank's own think tank CAFRAL had said. Fiscal breathing space but at what and whose cost?" Ramesh tweeted.
His tweet comes a day after RBI took the decision in line with the recommendations of the Bimal Jalan Committee.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi also slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman over their 'self-created economic disaster'."PM & FM are clueless about how to solve their self created economic disaster. Stealing from RBI won't work - it's like stealing a Band-Aid from the dispensary & sticking it on a gunshot wound. #RBILooted," Rahul tweeted on Tuesday.
On Monday, a press note from the RBI said that it has decided "to transfer a sum of Rs 1,76,051 crore to the Government of India comprising Rs 1,23,414 crore of surplus for the year 2018-19 and Rs 52,637 crore of excess provisions identified as per the revised Economic Capital Framework (ECF) adopted at the meeting of the Central Board today."
It may be recalled that the RBI in consultation with the Government of India had constituted an Expert Committee to Review the Extant Economic Capital Framework of the Reserve Bank of India under the chairmanship of Dr Bimal Jalan.
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"The Committee's recommendations were based on the consideration of the role of central banks' financial resilience, cross-country practices, statutory provisions and the impact of the RBI's public policy mandate and operating environment on its balance sheet and the risks involved," the note said.
The note further said, "The Committee's recommendations were guided by the fact that the RBI forms the primary bulwark for monetary, financial and external stability... Hence, the resilience of the RBI needs to be commensurate with its public policy objectives and must be maintained above the level of peer central banks as would be expected of a central bank of one of the fastest-growing large economies of the world.