The State Bank of India has asked more than 70,000 employees of its former associate banks to return the compensation they received for working overtime on days following demonetisation in 2016, India Today reported on Monday. The public sector bank added these employees to its workforce after the State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Patiala and State Bank of […]

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar alleged on Saturday that banks did not implement demonetisation in a proper manner, and said people could not receive benefits to the desired extent owing to it. Addressing a quarterly review meeting of state-level bankers’ committee in Patna, Kumar also made an indirect reference to the PNB fraud, stating that big defaulters were able to obtain huge loans and escape from the country, while the […]

Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Saturday that demonetisation was “not a good” initiative and if he were the prime minister he would have thrown the proposal into the “dustbin”. Gandhi is on a five-day trip to the Southeast Asian countries. He began the Malaysia leg of his visit on Saturday and interacted with an “enthusiastic gathering” of Indian diaspora in Kuala Lumpur. Asked how he would have rolled out […]

Almost a year after demonetisation RBI says still verifying returned notes Almost a year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetisation, the Reserve Bank of India said that the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 bills returned to banks are still being “processed in all earnest” through a sophisticated currency verification system. In reply to an RTI query, the central bank said it has processed about 1,134 crore pieces of Rs.500 […]

Over the past few weeks, a ferocious disagreement has raged between several Indian economists. The heart of the matter concerns the impacts of demonetisation and the goods and services tax (GST) on India’s broader economy. Let me be clear that I use the word disagreement rather than debate advisedly. Surjit Bhalla, now a member of the prime minister’s economic advisory council, set the ball rolling by claiming that growth rates […]

Let’s begin with two questions. One, if Raghuram Rajan didn’t approve of demonetisation “at any point during his term”, how did the government claim it got the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on board some six months before the launch to start preparations for the massively disruptive exercise in the economy? Rajan left the RBI on 4 September 2016 and demonetisation was announced just two months later, on 8 November […]

Modi shocked India when Rs 500 (£6) and Rs 1,000 (£12) notes were withdrawn Panic set in across India with many people rushing to exchange their life-savings People were forced to declare, exchange or throw away their money Black money refers to funds earned on the black market, on which income and other taxes have not been paid. It was thought that black money would get burnt or caught in […]

People with a legitimate reason for not being able to deposit old 500 and 1,000 – rupee notes – like those in prison – cannot be denied the right to swap the outlawed currency for new notes, the Supreme Court said today, asking the government to explain how it will help these citizens by the 17th of this month. In November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the shock announcement that […]

The Modi government is expected to accelerate economic reforms as the BJP looks set to score a huge win in Uttar Pradesh assembly election, which was billed as a referendum on demonetisation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP was headed for a two-thirds majority to make a comeback in the country’s largest state, counting trends indicated. The outcome belies apprehensions in the Sangh Parivar and a section of the BJP about […]

Yaga Venugopal Reddy is a man of few words, but his words carry a lot of weight — especially in the world of finance. Earlier this week, the soft-spoken former governor of Reserve Bank of India chose strong words to describe the state of play at the central bank. The “institutional identity of the RBI has been damaged” and it is facing “reputational risk”, Reddy told a television news channel, […]