Currency fall: Rupee "held back very well", says Sitharaman
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Pune: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman claimed on Saturday that the rupee has "held back very well", compared to other currencies, against US Dollar. On Friday, Rupee had slumped to the all-time low of 81.09, PTI reported.
Sitharaman told reporters that both the Finance Ministry and the Reserve Bank of India are keeping a close watch over the developments.
"If any one currency which has held its own and did not get into fluctuation or volatility as much as other currencies, it is the Indian rupee. We have held back very well," she told reporters at Pune.
She asked a reporter to do a study on how other currencies are behaving against the US dollar in the latest fall.
Experts opine that the last depreciation of currencies was triggered by adverse global developments, mainly the Russia-Ukraine situation. The war inflated commodity prices, inciting inflation in the developed world, which caused the steep rate hikes by the US Fed. This caused capital to return to the US, and currency depreciation occurred, they say.
On Thursday, the rupee fell 83 paise, its biggest single-day loss in nearly seven months- to close at 80.79. The RBI has been deploying the dollar reserves to defend the currency and has exhausted billions of dollars of currency assets in the fight.
There have also been policy moves to attract more deposits from the diaspora through further incentives and other such attempts to stem the fall.