In a first, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has become the first monetary authority in the world to have more than 1 million followers on its official Twitter handle. It is followed by as many as 10,00,513 people around the world.
The achievement is impressive as the 85-year-old Reserve Bank of India was also a latecomer to the world of Twitter as it created the account only in January 2012.
Despite much less monetary firepower, Reserve Bank of India has beaten the world’s most powerful central banks — the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank — on Twitter by a wide margin, emerging as the most popular central bank on Twitter.
“RBI Twitter account reaches 1 million followers today. A new milestone. Congratulations to all my colleagues in RBI,” Governor Shaktikanta Das Tweeted.
Besides the main twitter handle, the RBI also has another Twitter account called ‘RBI Says’, which it uses to reach out to the common-man and has also started a Facebook page with the same name in early April. It has also launched a customer awareness campaign to prevent gullible account-holders from being duped by fraudsters.
At the second slot is the much lesser known central bank of Mexico (Banco de Mexico) with 7.74 lakh followers, followed by Bank of Indonesia (7.57 lakh).
Governor Das, who assumed office in December 2018, has a separate Twitter handle with 1.35 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. And during the first seven-week of lockdown that began on March 25, followers have increased by more than 1.5 lakh, according to an official.
