RBI stopped production of ‘easy to counterfeit’ Rs2,000 notes: RTI info
21 Jan 2020
Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has stopped the production of Rs2,000 notes and no single note has been printed in the last financial year, according to information based on a Right to Information (RTI) application filed by The New Indian Express.
According to the RTI reply, RBI printed 3,542.991 million Rs2,000 banknotes in 2016-17. This was reduced to 111.507 million notes in 2017-18, and in 2018-19, the RBI printed just 46.690 million such notes.
Despite claims of features like the anti-theft nano chip, Rs2,000 note proved to be easy to forge. It is believed that more counterfeits of the Rs2,000 currency notes are now in circulation than those of the earlier Rs1,000 and Rs500 notes that were withdrawn in the demonetisation exercise.
Rs2,000 notes make up for 56 per cent of all seized fake currency, shows NCRB data, which also says that the fake Rs2,000 notes entered the market days after PM Narendra Modi's demonetisation announcement. Today they are the biggest contributors to the value of seized counterfeit currency, says the report.
According to the RBI report, the share of Rs2,000 notes in value term was 50.2 per cent in 2016-17, which later fell to 31.2 per cent in 2018-19.
The value of all Rs2,000 notes issued in 2016-17 stood at Rs6,57,100 crore; only Rs15,500 crore worth fresh Rs2,000 notes were added in 2017-18, which takes the total to Rs6,72,600 crore.
The annual report of the RBI says that, the counterfeit notes of Rs500 (new design) increased by 121 per cent to 21,865 pieces during 2018-19. For Rs2,000 notes, it is nearly 22 per cent increase in the detection of counterfeit at 21,847 pieces. Totally 12,728 counterfeit notes of Rs2,000 were detected in 2018-19 as compared to 79 in 20117-18.
NCRB’s latest annual report titled ‘Crime in India‘ reveals that in 2017 and 2018, agencies seized Fake India Currency Note (FICN) worth Rs46.06 crore. Of this, 56.31 per cent was in the form of fake Rs2,000 notes.