Which British Governor General is credited for initiation of constituting a central bank for India?

The efforts to constitute a central bank for India can be traced back to Warren Hastings’s proposal for a ‘General Bank of Bengal and Bihar’ in 1773. The initiatives with regard to central banking in the colonial era had to face stiff resistance. Many such proposals faced failures. The amalgamation of the three Presidency Banks and emergence of the ‘Imperial Bank of India’ in 1921 was the first concrete step in this direction. A sequence of events subsequently led to introduction of the Reserve Bank Bill (1933) and the Reserve Bank of India Act came into force on January 1, 1935. The Reserve Bank commenced operations on April 1, 1935. It was nationalized on January 1, 1949 in terms of the Reserve Bank of India (Transfer to Public Ownership) Act, 1948.