How soon will the Reserve Bank of India raise rates and how high will it have to take them Those have become urgent questions for bankers in Mumbai after elevated energy-import costs pushed the rupee to a record low Thursday. India’s challenge is similar to Japan’s, where the yen slid past the 160 mark against the dollar to its weakest level since 2024. Just as the Bank of Japan under Governor Kazuo Ueda is reluctant to commit to a rate increase, his RBI counterpart Sanjay Malhotra, too, has signaled a preference to stay on pause. The central bank would step in, he said in an April 18 speech at Princeton University, “through its influence on inflation expectations rather than through blunt demand compression,” a euphemism for monetary tightening.