Bengaluru: In a first among central banks, the Reserve Bank of India has become the first monetary authority in the world to have more than one million followers on its official Twitter handle.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has become the first central bank in the world to have more than one million or 10 lakh Twitter followers. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das congratulated his central bank colleagues following the development.

“RBI Twitter account reaches one million followers today. A new milestone. Congratulations to all my colleagues in RBI,” Das said in a Twitter post.

 

RBI’s achievement is commendable, considering that the 85-year-old central bank was a latecomer on Twitter. Its account was created in January 2012, much later than the Twitter handles of US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB).

The second-most followed central bank on Twitter is the Banco de Mexico or the central bank of Mexico. It has 7.74 lakh followers, followed by the Bank of Indonesia with 7.57 lakh followers.

Since March 2019, the count of followers has more than doubled from just about 3,42,000 to over 7,50,000 by March 2020.

During the ongoing seven-week lockdown that began from March 25, the number of followers has increased by more than 1.5 lakh, an official said.

In the current financial year, as many as 2.5 lakh new followers joined the handle.
Besides, its main Twitter handle, RBI has another Twitter account called 'RBI Says' and also started a Facebook page with the same name in early April. At that time, it also launched a customer awareness campaign to prevent gullible account holders from being duped by fraudsters.