India's foreign exchange reserves, January 2015 through the latest available reading, plus a new currency segment on the rupee's own trend against the US dollar. The MoSPI connector's own data stops mid-2025 in both series — everything after that is scraped directly from RBI's own public archives, shown as a dashed, separately-sourced extension.
Record reserves, then a $61.6bn slide
Total foreign exchange reserves, US$ billions
Solid line: MoSPI connector (monthly). Dashed line + dots: real weekly readings scraped from RBI's own site.
View full data table (126 connector months + 56 weekly readings scraped from rbi.org.in)
Currency: the rupee against the US dollar
RBI Reference Rate, ₹ per US$1 — higher means a weaker rupee, not a stronger one.
The RBI Reference Rate is the daily benchmark INR/USD rate RBI publishes (computed by FBIL, the industry benchmark administrator, since 2018) — not a rate anyone actually traded at. It's quoted as ₹ needed to buy US$1, so this line rising is the rupee weakening over the same stretch of 2026 — the same underlying episode as the "-8.5% slide" in the reserves chart above, even though the two lines move in opposite visual directions on the page.
View full data table (126 connector months + 51 weekly readings scraped from rbi.org.in)
- The MoSPI connector itself is still frozen at June 2025 for reserves — re-checked 18 July 2026, no new data. Everything after that point is scraped directly from RBI's own site, not from the connector.
- How the reserves bridge was scraped: RBI's Weekly Statistical Supplement archive is fully enumerable — every release from 19 Sep 1998 to today sits at a sequential
WSSView.aspx?Id=NURL, no login or API key needed. Each release's "as on" reserve date is 7 days before its publish date — an easy mislabel if you take the release date at face value (a couple of the earlier press-sourced figures in this bulletin's prior version had exactly that off-by-one-week error). - New all-time high: $728.5bn on 27 Feb 2026 — surpassing the $705.8bn (Sep 2024) peak this bulletin previously called the record.
- The slide didn't stop in March. After the Feb 27 peak, reserves fell through a "West Asia conflict" shock and rupee defense to $688.1bn by 27 Mar, briefly steadied, then fell further to a true trough of $666.9bn on 26 Jun 2026 — a full -$61.6bn (-8.5%) peak-to-trough. The $675.2bn reading on 10 Jul is a partial recovery off that trough, not off the February peak.
- 2022 drawdown (for context): reserves fell from $640.7bn (Aug 2021) to $532.7bn (Sep 2022), ~17%, during Fed tightening and dollar strength.
- Reserves figures are RBI's own reported totals (foreign currency assets + gold + SDRs + reserve tranche position in the IMF), US$-converted by RBI at the time of reporting.
- Currency data comes from two different RBI series, not one continuous feed: the connector's "Monthly Average Exchange Rates" indicator (through July 2025), then a direct scrape of RBI's Reference Rate Archive (
rbi.org.in/scripts/referenceratearchive.aspx) for daily rates since, downsampled to one reading per week to match the reserves chart's density. A dead end along the way: the WSS's own historical "Foreign Exchange Rates - Spot and Forward Premia" table (PARAM1=6) — the same archive style used for reserves — turns out to have been discontinued in December 2012, so it couldn't be used to bridge anything current. - The rupee's depreciation accelerated sharply: roughly 38% over the decade from Jan 2015 (₹62.23) to Jul 2025 (₹86.11, a MoSPI-connector monthly average) — call it ~3.3%/year — then another +11.9% in the twelve months since, to ₹96.37 on 17 Jul 2026. The weakest single session in this window was ₹96.84 around 19–20 May 2026, when the rupee briefly touched a fresh record low before recovering somewhat into July — external market data shows a nearby but not identical ~₹96.6 low for that window — close enough to confirm the same record-low episode, but not an exact match, likely reflecting different intraday sampling points between RBI's Reference Rate and market data feeds. This session low is a discrete daily spot reading and sits above the ₹96.37 figure shown on the chart above, which plots a weekly/period series rather than the single worst trading session, so the two numbers are not directly comparable.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
