Digital innovation strengthening India’s financial ecosystem: PM Modi 

“The digital innovation continues to strengthen India’s financial ecosystem, empowering countless lives,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sunday.

Modi commended the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for bagging the Digital Transformation Award 2025 from the Central Banking, London, UK.

Taking to X, Modi said: "A commendable accomplishment, reflecting an emphasis towards innovation and efficiency in governance.

"Digital innovation continues to strengthen India’s financial ecosystem, thus empowering countless lives."

A commendable accomplishment, reflecting an emphasis towards innovation and efficiency in governance.

Digital innovation continues to strengthen India’s financial ecosystem, thus empowering countless lives. https://t.co/WomTSvXTCa

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 16, 2025

The RBI has been selected by Central Banking, London, UK, for the Digital Transformation Award 2025. 

It was awarded and recognised for its initiatives, including the Pravaah and Sarthi systems, which were developed by the in-house developer team. 

The awards committee noted how these digital initiatives have reduced the use of paper-based submissions, thus transforming RBI’s internal and external processes.

London-headquartered Central Banking has provided independent coverage, detailed data analysis, expert training and truly global networking events for more than 3 decades.

The Reserve Bank of India is termed a “big and complex organisation” with around 13,500 staff members spread across more than 40 branch offices, the Central Banking staff noted, while adding that 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.

Also taking note of the increasing digitalisation initiatives taken up by the RBI, it said until recently, these roles were heavily paper-based, with a lot of manual intervention and uneven adoption of digital tools.

Recalling the work done by the former RBI governor Shaktikanta Das during his tenure, the Central Banking noted that 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. Through Sarthi, RBI’s internal workflows were digitised. 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,” it recalled, while mentioning that in May 2024, in the second stage of digitalisation, Pravaah was launched, which created a digitised means for external users to submit regulatory applications to the RBI.

It added that Pravaah has so far allowed more than 70 different regulatory applications to be digitised, supporting the work of nine RBI departments.