Hold Your Horses Media, The RBI Says It’s Still Counting The Old Notes

In the last couple of days, some media outlets have run speculative reports claiming that most of the demonetised currency has come back into the banking system. Bloomberg report said yesterday that Indians have deposited 97 per cent of the demonetised notes till 30 December. Business Standard report claimed that the figure was 94 per cent. Both the claims were based on unnamed sources. During the past two months, mainstream media has run many such reports often exaggerating the amount received by the banks, only to be refuted later by the RBI. However, they don’t seem to have learnt their lessons.

Today (5 January), the RBI has released a statement saying that it is still finding out the actual amount that has returned and taking precaution to eliminate accounting errors or possible double counts.

Here is the complete statement put out by the RBI:

There had been various estimates on SBNs tendered in certain sections.

We would like to clarify that the periodical SBN figures released by us were based on aggregation of accounting entries done at the large no of Currency Chests all over the country. Now that the Scheme has come to an end on December 30, 2016, these figures would need to be reconciled with the physical cash balances to eliminate accounting errors/ possible double counts etc. RBI has already initiated this process and till this is completed any estimate may not indicate the actual numbers of the SBNs that have been returned. RBI is taking all steps to complete the process expeditiously so as to release firm figures of SBNs received at an early date.