The cost of capital needs to be lowered to support economic growth, said principal economic adviser in the finance ministry Sanjeev Sanyal, building a case for a rate cut by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its February monetary policy review. The macro environment has by and large improved and conditions are in place for re-acceleration of the economy, Sanyal said in an interview. “Now that we have anchored inflation to a lower level, we need to bring down interest rates to be in sync with the new inflation rates. How we achieve this transition is, of course, the RBI’s and monetary policy committee’s prerogative,” said Sanyal. Sanjeev Sanyal, principal economic adviser in the finance ministry, maintains a fine balance between his profession of an economist advising the government on the financial sector and his interest in reading and writing on history. In an interview, Sanyal talks about supervising more closely the larger systemically important nonbanking financial companies