The bank's aggressive monetary tightening has slowed credit and industrial growth and reduced inflation, they said, suggesting that the rate-hiking cycle that started in late 2004 could be ending.

"The unchanged interest rates will likely suggest the Reserve Bank of India's comfort in the current domestic macro-economic scenario," said Manika Premsingh, an economist at brokerage Edelweiss Capital in Mumbai.

The bank may instead move to reduce cash in the banking system to cope with hefty capital inflows at its quarterly policy meeting Tuesday, analysts said.

The RBI has pushed its benchmark repo rate to a four-year peak of 7.75 percent in its drive to tame inflation, raising the repo, its key short term lending rate, five times between June 2006 and March this year.

India's inflation accelerated to 4.41 percent for the week ended July 14 from 4.27 percent the previous week, data on Friday showed.

But the figure is well below the bank's ceiling of five percent for the fiscal year to March 2008 and sharply down from a two-year high of nearly seven percent earlier this year, which prompted the central bank to warn that the economy was possibly overheating.