A special team with an undisclosed number of people, working round the clock except on Sundays, is still counting the old notes that were banned in the demonetisation order on November 9, 2016. And with that reply to the members of the Parliamentary Committee on Finance, RBI Governor Urjit Patel kept the nation in continued state of wonder and guessing over the real gains of the note ban.
The ban was on currency notes in the denomination of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 with the professed goal of wiping out black money in the economy. A bit later, the demonetisation was attributed to fighting terror financing by counterfeit currency, then the need to make India go cashless and move to digital money, like the western world. One reason attributed for this was the enormous cost of printing and distributing currency. A few weeks into the note ban, the jingoism changed: it was about "less cash economy" in place of cashless economy.
Apart from the confusion, the demonetisation resulted in massive corruption of its own kind: crores of rupees were deposited into the no-frills Jan Dhan accounts that till then had no money, and as the new larger R s2000 denomination notes made a return along with redesigned Rs 500 notes, it became clear that old notes were merely replaced by new notes, and the cash deposited did not measure up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's estimate of black money.
The only thing the note ban visibly achieved was that it deprived political parties of cash during the assembly elections in five states including Uttar Pradesh in February-March this year.
Patel told the Committee members that the banned currency notes are continuing to be deposited by cooperative banks.
