While policy repo rate is not cut, several other measures announced would help bring down interest rates in the market: President, FICCI

NEW DELHI, 09 October 2020: Commenting on RBI’s monetary policy announcements made earlier in the day, Dr Sangita Reddy, President, FICCI said, “FICCI is happy to see the MPC signalling that it is going to support measures to energize growth. Given the evolving growth-inflation dynamics, there was a need to have clear focus on reviving growth. While the policy repo rate was not cut by RBI, several other measures were announced that should help bring down interest rates in the market.”

The announcements to have on-tap TLTRO; enhancing the amount under Open Market Operations; laying out the plan to conduct open market operations in state development loans and giving banks further flexibility with regard to their SLR investments and extending the provision with regard to hold to maturity till March 2022 are all positive measures. “These would help improve the flow of funds in the system while enabling banks to manage the liquidity situation without facing many frictions given the government’s own borrowing requirements,” said Dr Reddy.

Another major announcement in the policy which reflects a FICCI suggestion, pertains to the housing sector where the lenders have now been given greater flexibility as the risk weight attached to housing loans will be determined by the loan to value ratio only. “This should give a fillip to the housing finance sector and encourage growth in housing loans and FICCI believes this will have a large multiplier impact on the growth of several other sectors,” Dr Reddy added.

The decision to increase the exposure limits on individual retail loans from Rs 5 crore to Rs 7.5 crore. FICCI is of the view that this would benefit both individuals and the small businesses that are currently gasping for liquidity support to keep themselves afloat.

FICCI welcomes the move of extending the co-lending model to all NBFCs and HFCs, while we feel that there is a need to simultaneously address some of the larger challenges that are being faced by the NBFC and HFC sector and enable them to support the economic revival process.

The decision to discontinue the automatic caution listing system will benefit the exporters as it was a long pending request of FICCI and we are happy to see a positive move in this direction.