RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das Honoured With 'Governor Of The Year' Award At Central Banking Awards 2023

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das received the prestigious Governor of the Year award at the Central Banking Awards 2023 on Wednesday, June 14. Das has been recognised as a remarkable figure in the world of central banking due to his exceptional leadership skills and skillful handling of different crises during his tenure.

"The RBI governor has cemented critical reforms, overseen world-leading payments innovation and steered India through difficult times with a steady hand and well-crafted turn of phrase," the organisers said in a statement.

He was nominated for the award by the publication in March 2023. He was given the title in recognition of his leadership of the central bank through times of global turbulence and difficulty. During the COVID-19 pandemic, large non-banking companies, the Russia-Ukraine war, and other events, he expertly controlled India's central bank and, ultimately, the whole banking sector.

He oversaw the settlement of several failed non-bank financial institutions as well as the continuous recovery of the banking sector, which had long been a drag on the economy.

Prior to Das' appointment, IL&FS, a prominent non-banking financial company, declared bankruptcy in August 2018, sparking a liquidity crisis and exposing flaws in the business models of several mid-sized banks that had extensively lent to NBFCs.

Several other companies followed suit, including Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank. Raghuram Rajan and Urjit Patel, Das' predecessors, had already taken certain efforts to address the non-banking financial crisis, such as changing the bankruptcy code to resolve NBFCs, but more measures were implemented during Das' tenure.

These included adopting liquidity requirements for non-banks and tighter oversight of the sector's major actors. A new scale-based regulatory framework for NBFCs was established in October 2022.