Topic: currency

P. Chidambaram was mocking the RBI for not completing the counting of currency notes 15 months after demonetisation. 

The Indian way of writing numbers, particularly large ones, results in a lot of unneeded mental gymnastics. It might be a good time to bring it to an end. 

Demonetisation was a political move with economic consequences. Among other things, it sought to uproot an old political elite that presumably depends on hoarded cash.

On 8 November, 2016 the Prime Minister announced on television that 86 per cent of the money in circulation in the Indian economy stood demonetised. There are still unanswered questions about the legality of the entire exercise and even the process followed to arrive at the decision.

Demonetisation was a courageous policy decision fraught with high risks. The purported objectives of the decision were to eliminate fake currency, weed out black money, and address tax evasion. Later, digitisation of the economy was also added to the list of objectives. How has demonetisation fared on these objectives?

Exactly a year ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an ambitious but enormously disruptive decision to invalidate Rs 1000 and Rs 500 notes, ostensibly...

Demonetisation was the first major formal recognition by the Government of India that the issue of black money needs to be tackled decisively. What has India gained and lost from demonetization and what are the lessons learnt?

Economic activity in the informal sector are yet to recover from the shock as no job creation seems to have taken place in this sector.

It's premature to decide whether demonetisation is a success or failure, write economists Jagdish Bhagwati, Vivek Dehejia and Pravin Krishna.

Since there were multiple objectives of demonetisation, one cannot completely say whether the experiment was a failure or a success.