The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has informed under the Right to Information (RTI), the process of destroying the bank notes of rupees 15,310.73 billion, which came back after the Demonetisation was completed at the end of March this year. However, the central bank, in the context of a provision of RTI Act, has expressed its inability to disclose how much money has been spent from the government treasury to destroy these discontinued notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees. RTI activist Chandra Shekhar Gaur of Neemuch, Madhya Pradesh, told on Tuesday that he received information about the destruction of banknotes in the currency notes issued by RBI on October 29 from the currency management department.
A senior RBI official replied on Gaur’s RTI application, “The specified bank notes (SBNs) of 500 and 1,000 rupees were destroyed through machines of currency verification and processing system (CVPS). This process ended till the end of March. ‘ “Here SBN stands for closed notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees”.
Gaur also tried to know from the RBI through his RTI application that how much money was spent in destroying the banned notes. In response to this question sent to them on behalf of the RBI, it said, “The information sought is not available to us as such, and the resources of the bank in collecting it will be incompatible. Hence, the information sought can’t be provided under Section 7 (nine) of the RTI Act 2005.
Under the RTI, it was also informed that when the ban was announced on November 8, 2016, total notes of worth rupees of 15,417.93 billion were actually in circulation (According to the verification and matching of the RBI). After the monopolization, the notes worth Rs. of 15,310.73 billion were returned to the banking system. It is clear from the reply of RTI that only rupees 107.20 billion worth of rupees worth of rupees can not come back to the banks after the note ban.
RTI Activist Gaur also said, In my petition, it was also questioned how much was the total number of notes destroyed of 500 and 1,000 rupees after the monopolization. However, he did not get any specific information from RBI about this.
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