Demonetisation: Modi’s Hollow Claims on Curbing Black Money -Prabhat Patnaik
-Newsclick.in The PM’s claim that greater cash use is associated with less transparency and hence a larger black economy is baseless, as is his assertion that cash use in India has fallen. On the fourth anniversary of demonetisation (November 8), Prime Minister Narendra Modi has claimed that it succeeded in curbing black money. He probably believes he can get away with making this claim because of the passage of time. But most people in the country know this to be a lie for a simple reason. For demonetisation to curb black money, there must be some mechanism through which it can be shown to do so. Otherwise it would be no different from claiming that the Olympic Games of 2016 curbed black money in India. Besides, since the fact of black money being curbed is itself not established, specifying a mechanism through which this could have happened, will enable us to check the veracity of at least some of the intermediate steps in the chain. The Modi government had actually specified such a mechanism at the time of demonetisation. This stated that demonetisation of currency notes will force the holders of such notes either to come out into the open to exchange them for new notes, at which point they have to explain how they managed to hold such large stacks of money; or to avoid such exposure by simply letting their currency notes “die”, which would be a blow against black money. Since currency is the liability of the Reserve Bank of India, if a part of it “dies”, while the RBI’s assets remain unchanged, it can print new notes in the place of the old ones and hand them to the government for use in any manner it chooses. So sanguine was the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) about the “killing” of black money in this way that it went around talking of distributing a sum of Rs 3 to 4 lakh crore, expected to be incapacitated thus through demonetisation, among the poor households. Please click here to read more. |
Newsclick.in, 14 November, 2020, https://www.newsclick.in/Demonetisation-Modi-Hollow-Claims-Curbing-Black-Money?fbclid=IwAR16q_73P73PTikTw4APopovisCQae7Te7wgutSB8a0JWjP_Ga2DAunddVQ
Tagged with: Demonetisation Note Ban Black Money Reserve Bank of India RBI Informal Sector Digital Economy
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