What's interesting is that Bollywood stars whose names were in the Panama Papers are lauding this 'demonitisation' move... it kinda underscores that real 'black money' isn't stuffed in mattresses, it's stored more cleverly in different types of assets, companies, offshore accounts.

Raghuram Rajan, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, had this to say a couple years ago about the idea: “Unfortunately, my sense is the clever find ways around it. They find ways to divide up their hoard in to many smaller pieces… I would focus more on tracking data and better tax administration to get at where money is not being declared. I think it is very hard in this modern economy to hide your money that easily.” http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/11/09/heres-what-raghuram-...

The fact that our Prime Minister’s fans are so enthusiastic and the move is aimed at curbing ‘black money’ makes it hard to clearly take a stand against this move, but I personally find it ill thought-​out. The fact that some wealthy people are evading taxes by sticking cash in a cupboard somewhere doesn’t mean that hundreds of millions of ordinary people should suddenly be unable to buy milk or bread, damn.