After Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's scathing remarks on the Reserve Bank of India's "lending spree", Governor Urjit Patel may consider stepping down from the role, a CNBC-TV18 report said. "RBI governor may even consider resigning. All options on the table," the report mentioned.

Quoting a source, the report said that there has been an "irreversible breakdown between the RBI governor and the government".

The news site has reached out to the RBI and the PMO but hasn't received any response as of now.

This development comes after RBI deputy governor Viral Acharya's fiery speech. In his speech, he warned that undermining the central bank's independence could be "potentially catastrophic". Government officials were left unhappy with Archarya's speech. Following this, the finance minister blamed the RBI for its lending spree between 2008 and 2014 that left banks with huge debts. His remark only inflamed the ongoing row between the RBI and the government.

As mentioned in the report, Acharya's speech was only a strike in the long-running tug of war between the government and the RBI on whether the bank should part with some of its Rs 3.6 lakh crore reserves to fund the country's fiscal deficit.

Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy showed his support for Patel and tweeted: "If RBI governor resigns then it is a direct consequence of FM blaming him publicly yesterday for NPAs. Patel is a self respecting scholar of economics (Ph.D in Banking from Yale). He should be persuaded to stay."

Adding another layer to this conflict, RBI board member S Gurumurthy wrote a letter to Urjit Patel complaining about Viral Acharya's speech. While refusing to divulge the contents of the letter, Gurumurthy told The Economic Times that he had objected to "Acharya going public on issues not discussed in or disclosed to the board which met just two days earlier".