Over 99 per cent of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes banned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the November 2016 demonetisation have returned to the banking system according to none other than the Reserve Bank of India. The RBI spent nearly 8000 crores printing new notes. The former Finance Minister P Chidambaram tweeted that the country ended up losing Rs. 2.25 lakh crore worth of GDP, crores of jobs and over a hundred lives. The big question: was demonetization, despite the significant addition of more tax payers, essentially a flop?
