The Reserve Bank of India imposed 353 monetary penalties totalling ₹54.78 crore on regulated entities during the fiscal year ended March 2025, according to its Annual Report for 2024-25, released on 29 May 2025.
Cooperative banks bore the heaviest enforcement burden in terms of the number of individual actions, with 264 penalty orders worth a combined ₹15.63 crore handed down over the twelve-month period.
PRIVATE, PUBLIC, AND FOREIGN BANKS ALL PENALISED
Among scheduled commercial banks, private sector banks were fined a combined ₹14.8 crore across 15 penalties during the year, while public sector banks paid ₹11.11 crore across 8 penalties. Foreign banks operating in India incurred six penalties.
Non-banking financial companies and asset reconstruction companies accounted for 37 penalty orders with a combined value of ₹7.29 crore.
The violations that triggered penalties spanned a broad range of regulatory requirements. Violations included cybersecurity lapses. Income recognition and asset classification norm breaches — where loans are not correctly categorised as non-performing — were another category of infringement, as were know-your-customer violations, deficient reporting to the central bank, and failures in fraud identification and classification.
The RBI has issued detailed instructions on IT and cybersecurity risk management.
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