Comment by knowThySelfx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knowThySelfx | Hacker News Reader

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The title itself is a misnomer. No one checking stuff in HBR? Only denominations of 500s and 1000s were made illegal. This was replaced with new 500 and 2000 Rupee notes. All the other denominations remained valid throughout.The intent was to control counterfeit currency. It also appealed the public to use more digital transactions.

Today, in TV there was news about a district in Kerala (Malappuram) having 50000 crores worth of old currency in the hands of various people there. The person whom the reporter interviewed was an agent who sold these old notes to some people for a percentage of the value of the old notes. They didn't say for what purpose the old notes are bought. A friend of mine who knows some Gujrathi cloth merchants in Kochi's main market was told these old notes are bought so that its thread can be taken for counterfeiting new notes.

5000 crore. in Kerala.

Theres so many things that raise flags there.

Thats a non trivial percent of the missing cash, whihc is very unlikely to be in one place.

Kerala gets most of its money via remittances, the idea that they would be a store of cash, especially when most of people convert it into gold around India anyway, makes it extremely hard to accept just from the face of it

It is not in one place, but in the hands of different people. Hawala (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala) is very active in certain northern districts of Kerala.

I agree, its a fairly non-trivial amount of money.

Heh, even hawala couldnt account for those numbers.

Total amount demonitized is 15.44 lak crore, 15.28 returned.

thats .16 lakh crore - or .16 * 100000 = 16000 crore missing.

and 5k of that is in Kerala.

It stretches my credulity.

Even I am not sure who is correct here. Either the guy is lying about the amount or the Govt is lying about amount received. Things aren't quite clear here.

There's this thing which goes by the name "Kunjalikutti fund" which isn't that trivial from what I heard ;)

The govt isnt lying - if they were the economy would lose altitude and correct at a much lower level - thered be no reason to keep faith in any of the govt numbers, and we would have moved much closer to banana republic status.

If the govt wanted to lie, they would have put up better numbers - meaning a larger gap between money demonitized and money received.

An old report on Hawala: http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2123/stories/200411190...

It's funny seeing so many people commenting about a completely fabricated headline.

The titling is deliberately chosen to mislead readers.

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