India, Nov. 30 -- In one of its most comprehensive such steps in decades, Reserve Bank of India has retired circulars that trace the entire arc of the country's financial regulation-from the paper-era instructions of 1959 to the digital-payments tweaks of 2019.

The clean-up is part of a sweeping consolidation that has reorganised more than 9,000 existing instructions into 238 Master Directions, now forming the sole library of regulations administered by the Department of Regulation.

The earliest withdrawn entries date to 26 March 1959 and 13 November, both issued under Section 35B of the Banking Companies Act, 1949. These instructions were drafted for a banking system that functioned without computers, without electronic clearing, and w...