In a reply to an RTI filed by The New Indian Express, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has revealed that it has stopped the printing of Rs 2,000 currency notes.
It has also revealed that it has not printed even a single Rs 2,000 currency notes this financial year.
“The RBI printed 3,542.991 million notes in the financial year 2016-17, which came down to 111.507 million notes in 2017-18 and was further reduced to 46.690 million notes in the year 2018-19,” as revealed by RBI.
“The high circulation of Rs 2,000 notes might defeat the government’s objectives as it is easier to smuggle the high-denomination notes. Earlier there were reports that printing of Rs 2,000 notes have been stopped but the government had denied the same,” the official said.
“There were 3,363 million notes in circulation at the end of March 2018, which amounted to 3.3 percent of the total currency in circulation in terms of volume and 37.3 percent in terms of value,” as per data released by RBI.
The RTI answer comes at a time after the National Investigation Agency (NIA) claimed that there are high-quality fake currency notes which have been resurfaced and Pakistan is the main source.
