The Reserve Bank of India today placed on its website the Report of the Committee on Data and Information Management in the Reserve Bank of India. Comments/feedback on the recommendations of the report may be sent by July 15, 2014 by email or by post to the Officer-in-Charge, Department of Statistics and Information Management, Reserve Bank of India, 4th floor, C-8 Building, Bandra-Kurla Complex, Bandra (E), Mumbai - 400 051.

Background

The present system of data and information management in the Reserve Bank evolved over several years in response to the emerging needs of the Reserve Bank and to disseminate information as a ‘public good’. With increasing integration with the global economy and the growing complexity of the economic structure, the information needs have increased considerably and data gaps are experienced in various domains of central banking. At the same time, information management and dissemination have become technologically more advanced and challenging. In response, the Reserve Bank of India had constituted a Committee under the Chairmanship of Shri Deepak Mohanty, Executive Director, Reserve Bank of India comprising members from banks, academia and the Reserve Bank of India to review the current system of data collection, dissemination and management processes and to examine the feasibility of moving towards granular, multi-purpose data collection and more integrated and structured data production processes.

Major Recommendations

• To address major data gaps in monetary policy-making, the Committee recommends the compilation of various indictors, such as producer price index, services sector output and price index, labour force survey, urban wages, retail sales, construction activity survey, and surveys of household indebtedness through co-ordination with the relevant government agencies. The scope and coverage of the financial soundness indicators may be expanded to non-bank segments of the financial sector and the frequency of compiling sectoral flow of funds may be made quarterly starting with the financial sector.

• The envelope of data elements across various returns in different information domains should be rationalised and the data should be moved to an enterprise-wide data warehouse (EDW) with appropriate access rights for users.

• For primary data, the Committee recommends that it would be optimal to dissolve the returns into data elements, which can be organised with relevant attributes and dimensions in the form of logically coherent datasets. This would also serve the current purpose of returns.

• The Committee suggests standardising various attributes and dimensions of data and recommends the use of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) as the principal vehicle for data submission.

• Using the secure network connections between the RBI server and the banks’ Automated Data Flow (ADF) servers, the contents of the dataset may be pulled or pushed and loaded onto the RBI’s server in an automated manner. Necessary provisions may have to be made to the banks’ systems, for this purpose.

• A dissemination policy for the Bank may be formulated and used as a guiding principle for disseminating or sharing information with various classes of users, within and outside the Bank.

• To enhance the data governance framework, the Bank should identify and assign the role of Chief Information Officer (CIO) to a senior official. The entire data requirements of the Reserve Bank should be managed centrally for coherence, consistency and accountability with necessary organisational changes to provide sufficient expertise and resources with the CIO’s office.

Sangeeta Das
Director

Press Release : 2014-2015/7