Now do the same exercise for the RBI, and the first thing to notice is a structural fact the Fed simply does not have: under Section 23 of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, the RBI's balance sheet is legally bifurcated into an Issue Department and a Banking Department. The Issue Department has exactly one job (issuing currency notes) and by law its note liability must be backed, rupee for rupee, by an "eligible assets" basket of gold coin and bullion, foreign securities, rupee coin, and rupee securities. The Banking Department does everything else a central bank does (government banking, bank reserves, credit operations, its own investment book) and carries a mutual receivable/payable line with the Issue Department to close the loop. No such split exists at the Fed, which runs one unified balance sheet; it is a genuine, non-cosmetic difference in institutional design, and it shows up directly in how RBI reports its gold holdings (split by department, not blended).
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What is on the RBI's balance sheet?
The RBI's Annual Report for FY26 (the year ended 31 March 2026, pull the Annual Report's Statement of Accounts yourself at rbi.org.in for the full detail; the figures below are as reported in RBI's own release and its press coverage) put the total balance sheet at ₹91.97 lakh crore, up from ₹76.25 lakh crore in FY25, a 20.6% increase, an absolute gain of ₹15.72 lakh crore. Compare that to the Fed: the RBI's balance sheet, unlike the Fed's, is dominated by foreign currency assets, gold, and loans to overseas financial institutions: 70.9% of total assets (down from 74.3% a year earlier), with domestic assets making up the remaining 29.1% (up from 25.7%). The reason is exactly the mirror image of the Fed's story: India does not issue the world's reserve currency, so the RBI must hold a large stock of foreign-currency assets and gold to defend the rupee, intervene in the FX market (M7.02's monetary policy tools), and stand behind the current-account and capital-flow swings M7.01's saving-investment identity introduced. A central bank managing a currency the world does not automatically want to hold needs a war chest; one that issues the world's reserve currency does not.
Why did gold surge while the foreign-asset share fell?
Read the composition shift carefully, because it is a genuine composition-effect lesson, not a rounding artifact. RBI's own reporting gives specific sub-line growth rates: domestic investments +44.9%, gold +63.8%, foreign investments +7.9%. Gold holdings reached 880.52 tonnes, split, per the Issue/Banking Department structure just described, into 312.32 tonnes in the Issue Department and 568.20 tonnes in the Banking Department, and the Banking Department's gold alone rose in value from ₹4.32 lakh crore to ₹7.06 lakh crore, a 63.6% jump driven mostly by the gold price rally rather than fresh purchases. Yet the overall foreign-plus-gold bucket's share of the balance sheet fell (74.3% → 70.9%), even as gold surged, because "foreign investments" (the FX-reserve securities proper, the large majority of that bucket) grew only 7.9%: far slower than the 20.6% growth of the balance sheet as a whole, so a fast-growing but still-minority gold position could not offset a slow-growing majority position. Meanwhile the smaller domestic-assets bucket, growing at 44.9% on its dominant sub-line, gained share simply by growing faster than the total. This is the composition arithmetic a headline ("RBI's gold holdings surge") completely erases and an analyst is expected to reconstruct.