Concise History of Reserve Bank of India, 1935-1981

"The Concise History of Reserve Bank of India" is an adaptation and abridgement of almost 3,000 pages of the institutional history, "Reserve Bank of India", published by the Bank in three volumes and covering the period from 1935, when the Bank was set up, till 1981.

The conceptualisation, writing and adaptation involved in bringing out this concise history of the Bank was inspired, when Dr. D. Subbarao, the former Governor of the Bank, expressed the need for a shorter and simpler history of the Bank during his visit to the College of Agricultural Banking, Pune in November 2012.

The Reserve Bank of India addressed various monetary and financial issues that arose during the pre-Independence, partition, post-Independence as well as the Planning periods. The policies and action taken in those days played an important part in determining the economic environment which sustained us and continues to do so.

The book goes up to the period 1981 and is almost entirely based on the official history of the Bank. The last section is drawn from the Bank's existing publication, The Reserve Bank of India' and is a quick overview of the functions and working of the Bank as it is today, to enable the reader to relate the past to the present.

This concise history re-organises the material contained in the three original volumes to trace the history of the Bank on functional lines. While every effort has been made to adhere strictly to these volumes, which are the official institutional history, some discretion has been used to explain the basic functioning of the central bank in an easily comprehensible language to provide an appropriate context to the narration. Smt. M.Rama Kumari, Assistant General Manager and Member of Faculty helped with the work relating to three chapters, viz. "Banker to Government", "From the Farm to the Plate" and "Money Creator".