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. In an RTI reply to The New Indian Express, 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.
As per RBI’s RTI response, there were 3,542.991 million notes of Rs 2,000 printed in the financial year 2016-17. 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.
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 demonetisation move, where it banned the old Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. While it minted new Rs 500 notes, Rs 1000 notes still remain banned.
A report on The Week from January 2019 quotes a top RBI official saying that RBI has reduced the printing of the notes to "bare minimum" in an attempt to curb money laundering.
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.
“Possibly, removing high-value notes from circulation makes it difficult to have too many black money transactions. But, it’s a better policy than demonetisation, which was very disruptive. Here, you are not disrupting anything. You are simply withdrawing circulation. “Many European countries have done this. But in India, we have a very large informal sector and an agricultural sector, which us cash rich,” the report quotes economist Nitin Desai as saying.
This RTI reply also comes months after the government denied reports that the printing of Rs 2000 notes were stopped. RBI too, as per the TNIE report, disclosed gradual reduction in circulation of the Rs 2000 notes. The latest RBI data shows that there were only 3,363 million notes in circulation at the end of March 2018.