New Delhi: The printing of Rs 2,000 currency notes has been stopped, the Reserve Bank of India has revealed in reply to an RTI. Not a single high-value note has been printed in this financial year.
The notes, along with new Rs 500 notes, were introduced in November 2016 after the government put a ban on the existing Rs 500 and Rs 1,00 notes in a bid to crackdown on the black money and wipe out fake currency in circulation.
3,542.991 million notes of Rs 2,000 were printed during the financial year 2016-17, the RBI has said in its reply to the RTI. The numbers came down to 111.507 million notes in 2017-18 and was further reduced to 46.690 million notes in the year 2018-19, The New Indian Express said in a report.
The experts are seeing the removal of high-value notes from circulation as a crackdown on the black money as it becomes difficult to make too many black money transactions in such a case.
According to officials, a high circulation of Rs 2,000 notes may defeat the government’s objectives as they are easier to use smuggling and other illegal purposes. Rs 6 crore of unaccounted cash in Rs 2,000 notes was seized near Andhra Pradesh-Tamil Nadu border.
The RBI data too has revealed gradual reduction in circulation of the Rs 2,000 notes. There were 3,363 million high-value notes in circulation at the end of March 2018 — 3.3% of the total currency in circulation in terms of volume and 37.3% in terms of value. The number was reduced to 3,291 million in FY 2019 — 3% and 31.2% of volume and value, respectively, of the total money in circulation.
The move comes at a time when the The National Investigation Agency (NIA) claimed that “high quality” fake currency notes have resurfaced with Pakistan being the main source. Over Rs 50 crore of fake currency notes have been seized in the past three years, the government had said in June.
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