LAF is a facility extended by the Reserve Bank of India to the scheduled commercial banks (excluding RRBs) and primary dealers to avail of liquidity in case of requirement or park excess funds with the RBI in case of excess liquidity on an overnight basis against the collateral of Government securities including State Government securities. Basically LAF enables liquidity management on a day to day basis. The operations of LAF are conducted by way of repurchase agreements (repos and reverse repos – please refer to paragraph numbers 30.4 to 30.8 under question no. 30 for details) with RBI being the counter-party to all the transactions. The interest rate in LAF is fixed by the RBI from time to time. Currently the rate of interest on repo under LAF (borrowing by the participants) is 6.25% and that of reverse repo (placing funds with RBI) is 5.25%. LAF is an important tool of monetary policy and enables RBI to transmit interest rate signals to the market.
