Commenting on first bi-monthly monetary policy of 2019-20 announced by RBI yesterday, Sandip Somany, President, FICCI stated that FICCI welcomes the 25 basis points cut in repo rate by the RBI, though it had expected a larger cut given benign inflation and slowing industrial as well as exports growth and liquidity concerns. The industry body hopes that the two consecutive cuts in the repo rate would translate into lower lending rates for both retail and corporate credit. This would give an impetus to the domestic economy through greater consumption demand as well as private investments.

Over the last few months, there has been an improvement in capacity utilisation across sectors as well as reduction in banking NPAs. The need of the hour is for monetary policy to complement the fiscal policy and strengthen the growth impulses that are slowly building in the economy. The real repo rate has remained high for a long time and there is a scope of further reduction in the repo rate.