99 percent of old currency are back into the baking system: RBI

The Reserve Bank of India on Wednesday confirmed that 8.9 crore old Rs 1,000 notes out of 632.6 crores have not been returned post the note ban last November. This means all but 1.4 per cent of the old Rs 1,000 notes has come back into the banking system. As per the data released by the RBI, old notes worth Rs 15.44 lakh crore were there in the market, out of which 15.28 lakh crore have been received by the bank.

The government had announced demonetisation of Rs 1000 and Rs 500 note on November 8, 2016, to flush out black money from the market. The government replaced old Rs 500 notes with new ones, but no replacement for Rs 1000 notes have been made. Instead, a new Rs 2,000 note was introduced post note ban. Besides, new Rs 500 and Rs 2000 notes, the RBI has also printed new Rs 200 notes.

RBI said there were as many 588.2 crores of Rs 500 notes, both old and new in circulation as of March 31, 2017. As of March 31, 2016, there were 1,570.7 crore Rs 500 notes in circulation.

The report further said that the cost of printing of currency notes more than doubled to Rs 7,965 crore in 2016-17 from Rs 3,421 crore in the previous year on account of new currency printing.