Digital transformation award: Reserve Bank of India

The Reserve Bank of India is a big and complex organisation. It has around 13,500 staff spread across more than 40 outposts around the large and geographically diverse country. It calls itself a ‘full service’ central bank, in the sense that it performs just about every role a central bank can perform, from promoting monetary and financial stability to managing reserves, supervising banks and non-banks, printing notes, handling payments and managing the government’s debt, among many other functions.

Until recently, these roles were heavily paper based, with a lot of manual intervention and uneven adoption of digital tools. Former governor Shaktikanta Das made it a strategic priority to enact a digital transformation to standardise and streamline workflows, cut costs and raise transparency.

Two initiatives have been key to this work. Sarthi, meaning ‘charioteer’ in Hindi, digitised all the RBI’s internal workflows. It went live in January 2023, helping employees to store and share documents securely, improving record management and increasing the options for data analysis through reports and dashboards.

A second stage of the digital transformation process launched in May 2024 as Pravaah – a ‘smooth flow’ in Hindi – created a digitised means for external users to submit regulatory applications to the RBI. Documents submitted and processed through the Pravaah portal are then plugged into the Sarthi database, where they can be handled digitally across the RBI’s offices, with centralised cyber security systems and digital tracking.

Shailendra Trivedi, chief general manager-in-charge of the RBI’s IT department, led the team that delivered both systems. He says Pravaah has been one of the “major initiatives of digital transformation” at the RBI and has received a “lot of top-level focus” from the governor and deputy governors.

By keeping development in-house rather than seeking an external vendor, the RBI says it made efficient use of resources and likely reduced the time to launch. “There was a lot of cost saving,” Trivedi says. “Our existing team, which developed the internal workflow system, Sarthi, developed Pravaah as well, so there has been no need for additional hiring.” The need for the Pravaah system was identified by Das in April 2023. Just over a year later, the system was live.

Pravaah has so far allowed more than 70 different regulatory applications to be digitised, supporting the work of nine RBI departments. Between its launch in May and the end of 2024, over 2,000 applications had been filed through the system, marking an 80% increase in monthly applications, partly due to the increased ease of use provided by the portal.

As well as raising efficiency, Pravaah adds to transparency by giving RBI managers a dashboard to review the status of each application and assess how long processing is taking. Applicants also get a clear view of the progress of their application, which was previously impossible under the paper-based system.

Pravaah builds on the success of the earlier transformation achieved through Sarthi. Trivedi notes Sarthi overturned around 90 years of paper-based processing at the Indian central bank, so the system’s big-bang launch could have been a significant culture shock to staff. But adoption has been enthusiastic, with well over 10,000 active users and up to 5,000 people logging into the system each day. The launch also required the migration of tens of millions of records from legacy applications.

The successful adoption of Sarthi is partly due to the team’s work in putting in place the necessary support structures. The IT team engaged in a lengthy collaborative process with staff to understand their needs before building the system, and appointed senior ‘nodal officers’ from each department to champion the upgrade. The online Sarthi Pathshala (‘school’) helps users become familiar with the system, and the Pathshala was rolled out alongside extensive in-person training. Additionally, Sarthi mitras (‘friends’) are people in each RBI office who know the system well and can help colleagues with any issues.

Overall, Sarthi has helped the RBI boost operational efficiency by automating processes. It allows task and performance tracking, improved collaboration, and integration with other RBI systems. Where previously the RBI’s many departments relied on a fragmented mix of manual and digital processes, Sarthi creates a unified global repository for the central bank’s information. Moreover, the RBI’s cyber security specialists are able continuously to monitor the system for suspicious activity.

Trivedi says the IT team is focused on continuous improvements to the digital systems. As well as upgrading the user experience in Pravaah, the RBI is exploring how to roll out the system to other financial regulators and law enforcement agencies in India to allow better collaboration. It is building instant validation methods for details such as unique tax identifiers and functionality to allow digital signatures.

More broadly, the rollout of Sarthi and Pravaah have led to a “marked shift” in attitudes at the central bank, Trivedi says, with staff now more open to using additional digital products. That has allowed the IT team to start laying the groundwork for further ambitious projects. “We are working on the cloud and new data centres,” he says. “A lot of strategic focus is there from the top management – making the RBI agile and future-proof.”

The Central Banking Awards 2025 were written by Christopher Jeffery, Daniel Hinge, Daniel Blackburn, Joasia Popowicz, Riley Steward, Jimmy Choi, Levente Koroes, Thomas Chow and Blake Evans-Pritchard.