The rupee fell 2.9% in 2024. It fell 4.9% in 2025 — the worst performance of any currency in Asia. In the first five months of this year, it fell 7%.

Nothing about India got three times more fragile in eighteen months. What changed is that somebody stopped holding the currency up, and had told us in advance this was coming.

This episode takes the rupee in three parts, each a different regime. How it was held for most of the last decade, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars in reserves. How that changed with a new central bank governor in December 2024, and what the currency then did — a record low in February 2025, a new all-time low in May 2026. And what's holding it up now, which is different again: not spot dollar sales, but borrowed ones, through swap windows with published end dates.

It ends on what's actually ours to check — not where the currency goes next, but whether our hedge coverage, the instrument behind it, and the forecast it's built on were ever updated for the regime we're actually in.

Including the honest caveat: letting a currency move freely is a defensible policy, not a failure, and two of the three forces pushing the rupee down aren't Indian policy at all.

Personal views. Not investment advice.

SOURCES

• Rupee depreciation — 2.9% (2024), 4.9% (2025, worst in Asia), 7.04% (Jan-May 2026)

• Record low 87.57 (6 Feb 2025); 94.71 (Mar 2026); 95.33 (30 Apr 2026); all-time low 96.82 (20 May 2026)

• RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra on intervention aims — "maintain orderliness and stability without compromising market efficiency"

• RBI reserves — peak $728.49bn (Feb 2026), $690.69bn (1 May 2026), record $729.3bn (week to 21 Aug 2026)

• RBI forward book record $136.7bn (Jul 2026), up from $106.6bn (May 2026)

• FCNR(B) deposit window — $52.3bn raised, closed early 31 August 2026; corporate borrowing window open to 31 December 2026

• Rupee past 95, 9 September 2026, RBI selling dollars as crude climbed

Figures are as reported. Check against the underlying data before relying on them.