No ₹2000 note printed this year, reveals Reserve Bank of India

Have you noticed that Automatic Teller machine has been rarely dispensing ₹2000 note recently?

This has happened because the Reserve Bank of India has stopped printing ₹2000 currency note. In the reply to a Right to Information query, it was revealed that Bharatiya Reserve Bank Note Mudran has not printed a single note of ₹2000 in the current financial year, reported The New Indian Express.

Around 3,542.991 million notes of ₹2,000 were printed during financial year 2016-2017, Reserve Bank of India said. The printing of the high-value note in 2017-2018 came down drastically to 111.507 million notes. In the financial year 2018-’19, RBI printed only 46.690 million notes. Till March 2018, 3,363 million notes of ₹2,000 were in circulation, which is 3.3 per cent of the total currency. By 2019, this has dipped to 3,291 million.

“The printing of 2,000 rupee notes has been substantially reduced. It has been decided to limit the printing of 2,000 currency notes to minimum. This is nothing new,” an unidentified RBI official had said earlier in 2019.

This move of RBI to print fewer ₹2,000 notes is seen as an attempt to prevent hoarding of the high-value currency and curb black money, said experts.

“Possibly, removing high-value notes from circulation makes it difficult to have too many black money transactions. But, it’s a better policy than demonetisation, which was very disruptive. Here, you are not disrupting anything. You are simply withdrawing circulation,” said economist Nitin Desai as quoted by The New Indian Express.

In January 2019, unaccounted cash of ₹6 crores in ₹2,000 notes was seized from the Andhra Pradesh-Tamil Nadu border. Over ₹50 crores in fake currency notes have been seized in the past three years, the Modi government had informed the Lok Sabha in June 2019.

In August, the RBI had said in its annual report that a huge increase in fake ₹2,000 currency notes was detected in the banking system in the 2017-18 financial year. The central bank said 17,929 fake ₹2,000 notes were detected in 2017-18 while only 638 fake notes of the same denomination had been detected the year before.

Central Bank’s response comes at the time when the National Investigation Agency has said that “high quality” fake currency notes have resurfaced, reported The Hindu.

NIA Inspector General Alok Mittal shared a presentation on Monday where he accused Pakistan of being the main source of printing of high quality fake Indian currency notes. Bangladesh, on the other hand, has emerged as the source of low-quality fake notes, Mittal added.

The ₹2,000 notes were introduced in November 2016, soon after the Narendra Modi government decided to withdraw ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes in an attempt to curb black money and fake currencies.