Although concerns about inflation had dominated monetary policy over the past decades in deference to a societal intolerance threshold, such an explicit commitment to a numerical inflation target as the centre-piece of policy had never been made. It was veritably a baptism by fire for the MPC, the new kid on the block in a cross-country sense of the term.
The amendment to the RBI Act, the inflation target and tolerance band around it, and accountability with respect to failure to achieve the target were notified in the Gazette of India during May-August 2016. They were widely telegraphed and occupied many media bytes.