Prime Minister Narendra Modi will virtually launch two innovative and customer-centric schemes, the ‘RBI Retail Direct’ scheme and the ‘RBI Integrated Ombudsman’ scheme, in the presence of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman at 11 am on November 12.
With the launch of this service, retail investors will have direct online access to the government securities market – both primary and secondary – through the RBI. There will be one nation, one ombudsman, one portal, one email address, and one address. These will be new steps towards inclusiveness.
The initiative will broaden the investor base and give retail investors better access to the government securities market. This is a significant structural reform that places India among the select few countries that have similar facilities. This measure, along with HTM relaxation, will help the government’s borrowing programme to be completed seamlessly in 2021-22.
The RBI introduced an Integrated Ombudsman Scheme on February 5, 2021, to replace the three ombudsman schemes that dealt with banking, non-banking financial services, and digital transactions, respectively. The RBI’s grievance redressal machinery operated around the clock, leveraging the capabilities of the Complaint Management System (CMS), a platform launched in June 2019 that brought all stakeholders, including RBI, Regulated Entities (REs), and complainants, onto a single web-based platform and digitalized the entire complaint handling process at RBI.
