‘Mumbai friends would know better': RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das has this to say about his 'white hair'

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das on Friday said that he attained wisdom early in his life and his friends from Mumbai would know better whether his white hair has grown or not since last year. 

On being asked whether his white hair has grown in the last year, he jokingly quipped, “I attained wisdom fairly early in my life and I have been having this grey hair for quite a long time. I think my Mumbai friends can tell you better on how many more have been added. But otherwise, it’s always been like that.” He was speaking at the BT’s Banking & Economy Summit in Mumbai.

Talking about the challenges during pandemic, he said every challenge becomes more difficult if one compares it with the previous one. “I was part of the government and we had to encounter so many challenges. When I joined RBI in 2018, the primary focus was on the NBFC segment.”

The IL&FS fiasco led to the drying up of liquidity in the finance sector. To counter that, he said, “We had to really focus and see that the NBFC sector makes a comeback. So, we intensively focused on the liquidity situation in NBFCs and the bad assets situation and by 2019, we came to the end of the problem.”

He highlighted that India has faced so many challenges post 2019. The first one, of course was pandemic and then the Russia-Ukraine war which affected the nation. On being asked whether he could have done things differently, he said, “I think we have been on the right path and inflation came up in the later part of 2020 which we tried to handle properly.”

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