New Delhi : Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday appealed to the people to bear with the inconvenience for a few days as replacement of the demonetised Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes is a massive operation that cannot be achieved overnight. He also said that the government was concerned with the hardships to people reflected in long queues at all banks.
He said the large number of people rushing to exchange the old notes will continue for the next few days but the process has to go on till December 30 and as such the queues will start thinning out after a few days instead of the people’s massive rush as if the new notes will be exhausted, he said.
Jaitley assured them that there is no shortage of the big denomination Rs 2,000 notes. They are available in all 4,000 currency chests of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and other banks and any lag in reaching them to the banks may be because of the transportation issues, he said, expressing happiness over the people’s patience seen in the long and serpentine queues being peaceful and not chaotic.
Addressing the media at the National Media Centre here after an emergency review meeting with the heads of top banks, Jaitley said he
was aware of the ATMs going dry across the country, pointing out that there were around 2 lakh ATMs and they will take another two to three weeks to be fully operational as it requires recalibration of each machine to dispense the new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes. So far, they are dispensing only Rs 100 notes for which they are calibrated and exhaust fast because of the heavy rush.
Just to give an idea of the massive operation going on in banks and post offices in addition to their normal activities, Jaitley said the State Bank of India (SBI) that caters to 20-25% banking needs in the country had carried out 2.28 lakh crore transactions till 12.15 pm since Thursday that included cash deposits of Rs 47,868 crore. If you multiply this by 4 or five, it will show around Rs 2 lakh crore to 2.5 lakh crore had been deposited in such a short time, he said.
He said the success of the demonetisation scheme to shift the cash transactions to the banking system could be judged from the people’s response. In the SBI alone, whose chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya was present along with Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das, notes of 58 lakh persons were exchanged, 22 lakh used ATMs and 33 lakh withdrew money from their accounts.
The FM trashed the Congress charge that the people were being prevented to use their own money in the bank, asserting that the government and the ‘janata’ have the right to know whether you gave tax or not and whether the money was earned honestly or not.
