With about Rs 8.45 lakh crore worth of scrapped notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 bank notes deposited in bank accounts across India over 20 days from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation announcement on November 8, banks are plush with cash and depositing it with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). And RBI has been supplying banks newly printed Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes, besides other valid currency notes, to meet the demand of people queueing up at banks and ATMs for cash.
But, what will RBI now do with the humongous stock of scrapped currency notes? It has already chalked out a plan. Even as sorting, verification and shredding of banned notes are underway at multiple centres of the central bank, a Kerala-based plywood company has received the contract to pulp these notes. The company has already accepted tonnes of currency notes over the past three weeks.
An Economic Times report quoted P K Mayan Mohamed, managing director of Western India Plywood (WIPL) as saying that the plywood company had received “over 140 tonnes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes for pulping over the past three weeks”.
