BHOPAL: If you had believed in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s categorical announcement that the commercial banks will exchange notes till December 31, 2016 and the RBI till March 31, 2017; you are in for a shock.
The Bhopal office of the RBI is not accepting the old notes – neither from the residents of India nor NRIs
Believing in Modi’s announcement, every day, droves of people are visiting the local RBI office to get old notes exchanged, only to be turned back. The guards at the RBI office located on the Maida Mill Road are shooing them away, leading to confrontations.
A barely-visible notice printed on a foolscap sheet of paper hanging at a pole more than a hundred metres away from the main gate tersely announces that only NRIs and Indians who were abroad from November 9 to December 30, 2016 can exchange notes from RBI offices at Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Nagpur till March 31. For NRIs, the facilities will be available up to June 30.
There is no cap on the amount of notes that can be exchanged but they will have to show IDs like Adhar, PAN and other documents to prove that they were abroad during said period as per the provision of Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA)
