Centralised Information Management System Will Change RBI’s Economic Analysis: Governor Shaktikanta Das

The new system is starting with reporting by scheduled commercial banks and will be gradually extended to urban cooperative banks (UCBs) and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs)

The RBI uses statistical methods in almost all its core functions and is both a compiler and a user of macro-financial statistics as well as other economic data collected through regular surveys.

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Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das on Friday said the launch of ‘Centralised Information Management System’ (CIMS) would lead to a fundamental change in the central bank’s economic analysis in the short to medium term. Das was giving the inaugural address at the 17th Statistics Day Conference organised by the Department of Statistics and Information Management, RBI.

During media interaction, the governor said, “In the short to medium term, it would lead to a paradigm shift in the Reserve Bank’s economic analysis as well as supervision, monitoring and enforcement across multiple domains.”

CIMS is a warehouse of data. This system uses state-of-the-art technology to manage big data and will serve as a platform for power users to carry out data mining, text mining, visual analytics and advanced statistical analysis connecting data from multiple domains, such as, financial, external, fiscal, corporate and real sectors as well as prices.

The new system is starting with reporting by scheduled commercial banks and will be gradually extended to urban cooperative banks (UCBs) and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs).

The central bank uses statistical methods in almost all its core functions and is both a compiler and a user of macro-financial statistics as well as other economic data collected through regular surveys. The RBI follows latest global prescriptions and best practices, and pursues standardisation across domains to generate consistent, comparable and harmonised statistics. “We treat data as ‘public good’ and are disseminating increasingly more data in public domain for use by analysts, researchers and general public. Our preference is for general dissemination over meeting individual requirements,” Das said,

A major recommendation on system-based submission of the remaining email-based reporting will be implemented through CIMS in the coming months, according to the governor.

Das also mentioned that weekly statistical supplement (WSS) for the week ended June 23 was also complied and processed in the CIMS. "It will disseminate more data for public use and will also support on-line statistical analysis by external users at their end. Regulated entities will also have access to their past data and their assessment on quality parameters in the new system," he added.