Reportedly if you have been noticing that ATMs have not been dispensing Rs 2,000 notes as often as they did before, it is because the Reserve Bank of india (RBI) has stopped printing them. Meanwhile in an RTI reply, RBI said that not a single Rs 2,000 note was printed by the Bharatiya Reserve Bank Note Mudran Private Limited in the current financial year.
Furthermore as per RBI’s RTI response, there were 3,542.991 million notes of Rs 2,000 printed in the financial year 2016-17. Perhaps this was then substantially reduced to only 111.507 million notes being printed in 2017-18 and a further reduction to just 46.690 million notes being printed in 2018-19. Further this also comes at a time when the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has said that high quality fake currency notes have resurfaced, as per a Hindu report. The Rs 2000 note was introduced in November 2016, after the government’s demonetization move, where it banned the old Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes.
Moreover the TNIE report quotes experts as saying that this move by the government to slowly phase out this high value denomination could be part of its attempts to curb black money transactions. Apparently RTI reply also comes months after the government denied reports that the printing of Rs 2000 notes were stopped. RBI too, disclosed gradual reduction in circulation of the Rs 2000 notes and te latest RBI data shows that there were only 3,363 million notes in circulation at the end of March 2018.
