Did no one consider the consequences of this move? Surely there were people in government that testified to the fact that over 80% of the currency in circulation were these larger bills?
Either this was intentional to move to the country to electronic payments or some elected people didn't listen to anybody, did no analysis and were so clueless they didn't realize this would happen?!
If their elected officials really cared about the people as much as they cared about stopping corruption, they should have figured out some type of gradual roll-out policy. Or they could have simply allowed 500/1000 notes but refused to print any more and ordered banks to send all of those notes to their mint. They could then slowly replace the notes over a year and eventually, declare 500/1000 not legal tender after a year, rather than trying to do this all at once.