Supply of new notes are enough to ease currency crisis: RBI

The government is supplying enough notes of various denominations to ease the currency crisis, Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor R Gandhi said on Wednesday. Old notes returned amount to about Rs 11.55 lakh crore as of December 6, he told reporters at a briefing. 

The presses are working to full capacity and all efforts are being made to make new notes available across the country. In fact, from November 10 to December 6, the RBI has supplied notes of various denominations worth Rs 3.81 lakh crore, Gandhi said. As regards lower denomination notes of Rs 100, Rs 50, Rs 20 and Rs 10, the



bank has supplied 19.1 billion pieces during this period. This is more than what it had supplied to the public over the last three years, Gandhi added.

He also said the decision to print Rs 2,000 notes was prompted by “the total level of transactions that people want to conduct.” ‘To unearth black money’ The decision to ban Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 was not taken in haste, he said. “The motivations for the decision are to deal with the problem of high quality counterfeit notes in these denominations and to unearth black money that may be held in cash,” he explained.