Just over three months after a mammoth demonetisation exercise undertaken by the government, the Centre and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) are now believed to have come up with a new plan to launch a new series of Rs 1,000 notes.
According to a report in The Indian Express, the RBI has already started printing new Rs 1,000 notes.
Quoting a senior government official, the daily said that the central bank had originally planned to pump new Rs 1,000 notes into the economy in January but it was delayed due to the need to supply Rs 500 notes.
It was, however, not clear when the new Rs 1,000 notes will be officially introduced, the report says.
On November 8 last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes from the economy to fight menaces like black money, counterfeiting and funding of terror activities.
To replace old notes, the RBI had issued new notes of Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 which carried new designs and high security features.
According to an estimate, the new notes were issued to replace Rs 15.44 lakh crore worth of demonetised currency notes.
Yesterday, the Finance Ministry said that over Rs 1 lakh crore worth of the new Rs 500 notes have already been printed with the presses churning out approximately 22 million pieces of it everyday.
"More than Rs 1 lakh crore worth new Rs 500 notes have been printed. 22 million pieces of Rs 500 being printed per day," Security Printing Minting Corporation of India Limited (SPMCIL) CMD and Joint Secretary in the department of Economic Affairs Praveen Garg told reporters here.
He was speaking on the sidelines of the 11th Foundation Day function of SPMCIL, which has nine units, including four mints, four presses and one paper mill under it.
An RTI query revealed that the Reserve Bank of India had a stock of only around Rs 4.95 lakh crore in the new Rs 2,000 denomination notes when demonetisation was announced on November 8. The RBI did not have a single new note of the Rs 500 currency, which were introduced into the system only later.
There were 17,165 million pieces of Rs 500 notes and 6,858 million pieces of Rs 1,000 notes in circulation on November 8, 2016, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetising the two high denomination notes.
The total amount of high denomination currency circulating in the system on that day was, thus, Rs 15.44 lakh crore (Rs 8.58 lakh crore in Rs 500 notes and Rs 6.86 lakh crore in Rs 1,000).
