RBI may be holding back Rs 2,000 notes, says SBI report

New Delhi: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) may either be holding back Rs 2,000 notes or could have stopped printing high denomination currency, says a SBI Research report.

Juxtaposing the data presented in the Lok Sabha recently with the one provided by RBI in its Annual Report earlier, the SBI Ecoflash report said on Wednesday, “we observe” that the value of small denomination currency in circulation up to March 2017 was Rs 3.5 lakh crore.

This implies that the value of high denomination notes was equivalent to Rs 13.32 lakh crore as on December 8, after netting out the small denomination notes from the currency in circulation on that day, it said.

The report further said that as per the Ministry of Finance in the Lok Sabha recently, the RBI has printed 1,695.7 crore pieces of Rs 500 notes and 365.4 crore pieces of Rs 2,000 notes as on December 8. The total value of such notes translates into Rs 15.79 lakh crore.

“This means that the residual amount of high currency notes (the difference between Rs 15.79 lakh crore Rs 13.32 lakh crore) of Rs 2.46 lakh crore may have been printed by the RBI but not supplied in the market,” said the report authored Soumya Kanti Ghosh, group chief economic adviser, SBI. Interestingly, the report added, “it is safe to assume” that Rs 2.46 lakh crore may be on the lower side as the RBI must have printed notes of small denomination in the interregnum (Rs 50 and Rs 200).

“As a logical corollary, as Rs 2,000 denomination currency led to challenges in transactions, it thus indeed seems that RBI may have either consciously stopped printing the Rs 2,000 denomination notes/or printing in smaller numbers after initially it was printed in ample amount to normalise the liquidity situation,” said Ecoflash.

This also means that the share of small currency notes in total currency in circulation now may have touched 35% in value terms, it added. The government on November 8 last year had announced demonetisation of high value notes, Rs 500 and Rs 1,000, which together accounted for 86-87% of the currency in circulation.

The move had lead to huge cash shortage and large queues were witnessed at banks for exchange or depositing the scrapped currency. The RBI introduced a new Rs 2,000 note as well as new version of the Rs 500 note. Subsequently, the RBI, for the first time, also introduced a Rs 200 note.