Union Minister of State for Finance Pon Radhakrishnan has asserted that the Centre doesn’t want to withdraw the existing Rs.2000 currency notes introduced soon after the demonetization drive which was launched by the Centre in September, 2016.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the entire nation by surprise by announcing on the night of 08th November, 2016 that the existing Rs.500 and Rs.1000 currency notes were being ‘demonetized’ and that they can’t be tendered on transaction.  Caught unawares by the announcement, people across the country went through hell for the next few weeks as they stood in serpentine queues outside lakhs of banks and ATMs to exchange their old currency and to withdraw notes of new denominations.

Centre argued that the demonetization was intended to unearth black money stacked in old currencies. Currency notes of Rs.200, Rs.500 and Rs.2000 denominations were introduced. In the meantime, MPs wanted to know whether the Centre was about to withdraw currency notes of Rs.2000 denomination to which Union Minister of State for Finance Pon Radhakrishnan replied saying the Centre didn’t intend to do so.

Filing a written reply in the Lok Saba, the Minister of State for Finance said that there was no proposal under consideration to withdraw the existing Rs.2000 currency notes. “We have have decided to introduce plastic currencies of Rs.10 denomination in Cochin, Mysore, Jaipur, Simla and Bhubaneswar. The notes would be printed in presses owned by the Reserve Bank of India,” he said.