The Reserve Bank of India's latest monthly Bulletin features four articles, including an analysis of monetary policy transmission and the performance of the non-banking financial company sector. The report also explores the use of alternative data sources for state-level economic activity measurement.
In its October 2026 issue, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released a monthly Bulletin containing speeches, articles, and current statistics. Among the four articles, two notable pieces discuss the Indian economy's strength and monetary policy transmission.
The article 'State of the Economy' highlights that despite renewed geopolitical frictions in West Asia and supply chain disruptions, the Indian economy demonstrated resilience as evidenced by high-frequency indicators across both industry and services. The headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation edged up in September 2026, driven by a broad-based increase in food, fuel, and core components.
Another article, 'Transmission to Lending Rates of SCBs: Price versus Composition Effects in WALR', by Yuvraj Kashyap, Kamal Gupta, and Arvind Jha, analyses the transmission of monetary policy to the fresh lending rates of scheduled commercial banks. The study found that a cumulative reduction of 125 basis points (bps) in the policy repo rate led to a decline of 93 bps in the weighted average lending rate (WALR) on fresh lending, with an interest rate effect of 80 bps and a composition effect of 13 bps during February 2025 to March 2026.
Source:
Reserve Bank of India
