Shaktikanta Das

Shaktikanta Das served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from December 2018 to December 2024, one of the longest tenures in recent RBI history. He is a 1980-batch Indian Administrative Service officer who came to the RBI from the Finance Ministry, where he was involved in the controversial demonetization decision of 2016. His tenure as RBI Governor saw a sharp economic expansion followed by the COVID-19 shock, during which he implemented significant monetary easing. He subsequently navigated the tightening cycle as Indian inflation rose. Das was known for maintaining a broadly accommodative stance that supported government borrowing and economic growth, while also modernizing India's payments infrastructure through oversight of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system. His tenure saw the UPI platform grow into one of the world's largest real-time retail payment systems, processing billions of transactions monthly and becoming a model studied by central banks in other emerging markets seeking to build modern digital payment infrastructure.