[Figures released this week by the Reserve Bank of India showed that 99 percent of the value of the old bills that had been removed from circulation eventually found its way back into the financial system. The figures suggested that criminals and other hoarders, like nearly everyone else, found ways to change their old bills for new ones.]
By
Jeffrey Gettleman
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Indian
citizens waited to exchange discontinued currency notes outside a bank in
New
Delhi in November 2016.Credit Altaf Qadri/Associated Press
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NEW
DELHI — Almost two years
ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India threw the country into turmoil when
he decided, by surprise and practically overnight, to effectively invalidate
the old paper currency.
Mr. Modi’s plan, kept secret even from his
cabinet until it was announced, gave citizens a 50-day deadline to turn in
their 500-rupee and 1,000-rupee notes to banks in exchange for new notes. After
the deadline, the old notes would be totally useless.
As Indians waited in interminable lines at
banks, and everyone from rickshaw drivers to real estate agents suffered a hit
to their businesses and lives, Mr. Modi’s team said the pain was necessary to
punish those who were hoarding ill-gotten cash.
These hoarders — including criminals,
terrorists and tax evaders — would be too afraid to exchange their old bills
for new ones, the thinking went, because going to banks would expose them to
scrutiny and possible prosecution.
But according to the central bank, it didn’t
work out that way.
Figures released this week by the Reserve
Bank of India showed that 99 percent of the value of the old bills that had
been removed from circulation eventually found its way back into the financial
system. The figures suggested that criminals and other hoarders, like nearly
everyone else, found ways to change their old bills for new ones.
Mr. Modi’s enemies instantly pounced on the
findings, saying the prime minister should apologize for all the chaos he
caused. Economists shook their heads.
“This was a big mistake,” said Arun Kumar, an
economics professor at the Institute of Social Sciences in New Delhi.
“Employment was lost, output was lost and investment came down.”
Mr. Kumar said Mr. Modi’s decision clearly
did not tackle the problem of illicit cash and was “a complete failure.”
Mr. Modi’s plan, called demonetization or
just “demo” by many Indians, was a huge gamble, possibly Mr. Modi’s biggest,
and some analysts say the prime minister will pay next year when he is up for
re-election.
It is also the way he did what he did that
ruffled many feathers. He did not consult Parliament. He did not solicit advice
from many learned advisers. He did not give the public any warning.
Instead, Mr. Modi made the decision in
intense secrecy with the input of only a few trusted lieutenants and then
sprung it on the nation, announcing in an unscheduled live television address
on Nov. 8, 2016, that all the big bills in circulation were suddenly invalid.
To keep the country in the dark, his
government had largely avoided printing replacement notes in advance. So for
months after his announcement, India suffered an acute cash shortage, with ATMs
running dry and people lining up for hours to turn in their old bills and wait
in vain for new ones. The stress pushed several people to suicide; others died
of heart attacks while waiting in bank lines.
So much in India turns on cash, not just
common purchases for goods and services like food and taxi rides. Even real
estate deals worth millions of dollars are sometimes done partly in cash.
Many economists believe that demonetization,
along with stricter tax policies that Mr. Modi’s government has put into
effect, has crimped India’s economic growth, which is running at around 7
percent a year.
That growth rate, however, is still the envy
of many countries. And some economists contend that it is wrong to consider
demonetization a failure, because the government can now obtain much more data
from the banks, forming a clearer picture of what’s happening in the economy.
“The risk to tax evaders has jumped sharply
and they should be on tenterhooks,” said Gautam Chikermane, vice president of
the Observer Research Foundation, a research institute in New Delhi.
Another goal of demonetization was to move
Indians away from cash. The idea was that Indians would bank more of their
money and the government could then track it more closely — and collect more
taxes in a country where only a tiny fraction of earners pay income tax.
To some degree, the banking sector did
benefit. In the wake of demonetization, millions of Indians opened their first
bank accounts.
But not all of that is attributable to Mr.
Modi’s efforts. India has been rapidly modernizing, and its economy is now the
world’s sixth largest (behind the United States, China, Japan, Germany and
Britain), though hundreds of millions of people are still very poor.
And even to this day, cash is still king in
India. Want to buy a table? More often than not merchants will offer two
prices.
If you want to pay by credit card, it’s this
much. But if you pay cash (which means the merchant will most likely not report
the sale), the price can be much cheaper.
Mr. Modi has kept quiet about the recent
demonetization findings, which basically confirmed those released a year ago.
He is a prolific Twitter user, with nearly 44
million followers. But his latest burst of Twitter postings show him shaking
hands with regional leaders or congratulating Indian table tennis players, with
nothing about the economy.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting from New
Delhi, and Ayesha Venkataraman from Mumbai.