In a country like India where incidents of old-aged people dying leaving large amount of undiscoverable currency in secret places hided from their children and grand-children not being uncommon, data revealed by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) of about 98.7 per cent demonetised Re-1000 notes deposited in banks till March 31, 2017 looks unbelievable. Moreover, many of Re-1000 notes in last 17 years (when these notes were first time issued in the year 2000) must have been destroyed with garment-wash, fire-accidents and other such incidents. It is noteworthy that large number of people could not deposit these notes in RBI since RBI did not stick to its promise of accepting at RBI till March 31, 2017. Large chunks of demonetised currency are still being discovered at various places by government-agencies.
As such data revealed by RBI leads to doubts about duplicate series of notes having been printed by the earlier government, perhaps this being the reason that RBI stopped providing deposit-details of demonetised currency after it was confirmed that 82.5 per cent of demonetised currency was deposited till December 7, 2016 with unending queues at that time for further deposits. Even remonetisation figure of 83 per cent by June 7, 2017 and much more after this date tends to confirm duplicate printing of notes, because no government can practically undo bold step of demonetisation through almost complete remonetisation. Perhaps central government and RBI may not expose the reality in order to save prestige of Indian rupee in global market.
Subhash Chandra Agrawal
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
