The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) today informed that almost demonetised Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes worth 12 lakh crore have been deposited into banks since November 8, the day the demonetisation decision was announced.
“Old notes worth Rs 11.55 lakh crore recovered after Demonetisation,” R Gandhi, Deputy RBI Governor said after the central bank's bi-monthly monetary policy review here, ANI reported.
The remark from the RBI comes a day after Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia said that the government expects the entire scrapped currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 to come back to the banking system.
According to the government’s estimate, demonetised currency notes worth Rs 14.17 lakh crore will return to the banking system by the end of March 2016. This, he said, will help the government to identify the black money hoarders and penalise them.
However, experts had projected that a part of the demonetised notes will not return to the banking system, providing substantial gains to the government considering that this will lower the liabilities of the Reserve Bank of India.
In a report, the State Bank of India, the country’s largest public sector lender, too had estimated that Rs 2.5 lakh crore may not return to the system.
It should be note that still 23 days are left during which people can deposit scrapped Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in the system.
Meanwhile, Gandhi further claimed that the decision to demonetising Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes was not taken in haste but was a well deliberated decision.
"The demonetisation decision was not taken in haste. 19 billion (1900 crore) new notes have been given to public, more than what we have supplied to public in the last 3 years,” he said.
To counter cash crunch, he said that the central bank was trying to provide adequate cash to different banks and that the RBI's note printing presses are working at full capacity.
“We advise people to not panic of hoard cash. They should also consider adopting more digital payments as there are many available options,” he said, adding that ‘as on December 5, notes worth 4 lakh crore have been supplied to the banks’.
SS Mundra, Deputy RBI Governor, who was also present at the press meet, said that the impact of demonetisation on the gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate would ‘only be 15 basis points and it will be transient’.
However, the central bank today lowered the GDP growth forecast by 50 basis points to 7.1 per cent from 7.6 per cent.
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