Which institution played an important role in India's monetary policy reforms…

Monetary policy — the set of tools an economy uses to control money supply, interest rates, and credit flow to balance inflation and growth — is, by law, the responsibility of a country's central bank, not its finance ministry or its capital-market or planning bodies.

In India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), established under the RBI Act, 1934, is that central bank. After the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis triggered the Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation (LPG) reforms, the RBI drove a major shift in how monetary policy was conducted:

• Interest rates were progressively deregulated, replacing administered lending and deposit rates with market-determined ones.

• Automatic monetisation of the fiscal deficit through ad hoc Treasury Bills was phased out under a 1994 agreement with the Government, reducing money-supply expansion driven purely by government borrowing.

• Market-based instruments — repo, reverse repo, and open market operations — replaced direct credit controls as the primary tools of liquidity management.

• Banking-sector reforms recommended by the Narasimham Committees (1991 and 1998) — prudential norms, reduced statutory pre-emptions (CRR/SLR), and greater operational autonomy for banks — were implemented under RBI's oversight.

• This trajectory culminated in a formal inflation-targeting framework, with the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) set up under a 2016 amendment to the RBI Act.

None of the other bodies carries this mandate:

• The Securities and Exchange Board of India (established 1988, statutory powers from 1992) regulates capital markets and protects investors — this is securities-market regulation, not monetary policy.

• The Ministry of Finance frames fiscal policy — taxation, government spending, and public borrowing — a separate lever of macroeconomic management from monetary policy.

• The Planning Commission (replaced by NITI Aayog in 2015) formulated Five-Year Plans and allocated public investment — a development-planning function, not a monetary-policy one.

Because the formulation and execution of monetary policy is statutorily vested in the central bank, the Reserve Bank of India is the institution that drove India's monetary policy reforms after 1991.