New Delhi:
Rajiv Kumar, the former vice-chairman of government’s thinktank Niti Aayog, today gave a mixed report card to the notes ban of 2016. The Supreme Court, which backed the notes ban in a 4-1 verdict, had steered clear of the question, saying it is “not relevant” whether the objective of the overnight ban was achieved or not.
Mr Kumar, however, told NDTV that he didn’t think the notes ban had managed to achieve all it set out to do. The only positive, he said, was digitisation.
The outcome of notes ban is “quite mixed”, Mr Kumar told NDTV in an exclusive interview. “Because given the nature of our economy, the unorganised sector in our economy, a large segment of our economy is running on cash, the large sectors like construction etc. the attempt to weed out the cash economy or the black money etc, I don’t think it would have been achieved,” he added.
While announcing the notes ban in November 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made it clear that the ban was part of a larger plan to curb black money, and thereby terrorism.
But six years on, the amount of fake currency in circulation is far more than 2016.