Around 99.3 per cent of the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes that were banned overnight in November 2016, have been returned, the Reserve Bank of India said in its annual report released on Wednesday.
Of the Rs 15.41 lakh crore worth Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes in circulation before November 8, 2016, notes worth Rs15.31 lakh crore have been returned.
The “humungous task of processing and verification of specified bank notes (SBNs) was successfully achieved,” the RBI said.
The SBNs received were verified, counted and processed in the sophisticated high speed currency verification and processing system (CVPS) for accuracy and genuineness and then shredded. “The total SBNs returned from circulation is Rs15,310.73 billion,” it said.
Post demonetisation, the RBI spent Rs7,965 crore in 2016-17 on printing new Rs500 and Rs2,000 and other denomination notes, more than double the Rs3,421 crore spent in the previous year.
In 2017-18 (July 2017 to June 2018), it spent another Rs4,912 crore on printing of currency, the report said.
The demonetisation was hailed as a step that would curb black money, corruption and check counterfeit currency, but the RBI said, “Counterfeit notes detected in SBNs decreased by 59.7 and 59.6 per cent in the denominations of Rs500 and Rs1,000, respectively.”
The RBI said, “Compared to the previous year, there was an increase of 35 per cent in counterfeit notes detected in the denomination of Rs100, while there was a noticeable increase of 154.3 per cent in counterfeit notes detected in the denomination of Rs50.” Counterfeit notes detected in the new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes during 2017-18 were 9,892 and 17,929, against 199 and 638 respectively in the previous year, it added.
