for the recent months, private consumption – especially urban demand – has remained healthy. the contact - intensive services have continued to make smart rebound, aided by unfettered resumption of activities and full - fledged celebration of festivals after two and half years. external demand, however, remains a weak spot in the face of accentuating global economic slowdown. 4. domestic inflation remains elevated. we are closely monitoring the inflation trends as well as the effect of our past actions. in our view, price stability, sustained growth and financial stability need not be mutually exclusive. in the mahabharata during the famous swayamvara when the great warrior arjuna aimed at the eye of the revolving fish through the pool of water below, he would have certainly assessed the speed at which the fish was revolving, the wind conditions, the intensity of the ripples in the pool of 1 / 7 bis - central bankers'speeches water, the noise levels in the king's court and similar other factors. no one can match the prowess of arjuna, but our constant endeavor is to keep an arjuna's eye on inflation, which is our primary target. at the same time, we keep assessing other related factors like the evolving inflation - growth dynamics ; soft indicators like our surveys on consumers and businesses ; global macroeconomic, financial and commodity market developments ; and financial stability. in other words, our policy measures are based on an assessment of the overall situation. we will continue to steer our policies accordingly. 5. in this direction, our continued effort is to put in place strong institutional frameworks to ensure a sturdy and resilient financial system that would be ready for the challenges in the future. let me highlight the major elements of this approach and our future path in five specific areas. i. monetary policy framework and price stability 6. over the last three years, we have utilised the flexibility in the monetary policy framework to calibrate our actions to counter the adverse effects of covid - 19 and other international factors like the war in ukraine. we have refined our inflation forecasting methodology by incorporating new techniques and are delving deep into the granularity of inflation projections. we have augmented our baseline quarterly projection model ( qpm ) with satellite models. we are also exploring techniques spanning new and diverse fields such as data science ( ds ), machine learning ( ml ) and night - time luminosity. 7. liquidity management constitutes an important aspect of the operating framework of monetary policy. a

together because they cover the entire gamut of the issues that are involved in these two pieces of legislation. ” 26. often what comes across as contraventions of fema indeed are issues related to tax evasion or money laundering. i wonder if it would not be more appropriate to deal with these wrongs within the framework of tax and money laundering laws. it is nobody ’ s case that these wrong doers should go unpunished ; indeed the punishment should be swift and exemplary. what i am emphasizing is that this should not colour our perception in respect of cross border transactions and mould our regulatory approach in a regressive fall back to the fera mindset. after all, countries with no foreign exchange laws do have such wrongs and do effectively deal with them. there is a case for avoiding any possible attempts for regression into fera regime. this will of course be helped by authorised dealers in foreign exchange collecting, collating and sharing the information so as to ensure that the regulatory intent is not compromised in letter and spirit. 27. just a word in passing on the internationalisation of the rupee in recognition of the fact that this is one of the themes of this conference today. this has been an exciting topic of discussion amongst the academia and market participants in recent times. in the annual conference of fedai held in zurich in 2012 4, i had alluded to this aspect in some detail keeping in view the seven prerequisites for moving towards internationalization of a currency as laid down by peter kennen. the issues relating to pace and sequence of internationalization ; in fact, even its definition and desirability, continue to be raised with a lot of passion. i must mention that the rupee was in a sense an international currency till the 60 ’ s and it was even a legal tender in parts of africa and much of gulf. those were the bretton woods days of fixed exchange rate and the rupee was linked to the sterling. after a quarter century of near autarchy in currency, the 90 ’ s saw a flexible exchange rate regime, complete convertibility on the current account and gradual opening up of the capital account. today, indian holding of global assets including the official reserves and the global holding of indian assets are very large. india has tremendous growth prospects and even in these days of tardy growth around the globe, the indian growth story continues to be a beacon of light. the world obviously wants to have a share of this pie and indian