Demonetisation: Why govt is wary of revealing data

New Delhi: The amount of demonetised cash deposited in all banks across the country could well be many times more than what the government calculated as just three major nationalised banks — the State Bank of India (SBI), the Punjab National Bank (PNB) and the Oriental Bank of Commerce (OBC) — are flush with almost half of the total demonetised cash amounting to Rs 14 lakh crore. The situation seems to have left the government in a quandry, as this clearly means that apart from the genuine cash which was demonetised, lots of fake currency and black money also entered the system since November 8, when the note ban was announced.

According to information available with this newspaper, SBI, the largest lender in the country, had total deposits of around Rs 3 lakh crore as on December 31, 2016. PNB had savings deposits worth Rs 2.23 lakh crore, while the OBC’s total deposits till that period were Rs 2,10,657 crore. The approximate total for these three leading public sector banks comes to around a little more than Rs 7 lakh crore.

What has compounded the Centre’s worries is not just the fact that it has to deal with the scenario where banks are overflowing with deposits, but also that it had admitted before the high profile Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Parliament in January that between November 8 and December 30, 2016, no counterfeit currency had been seized.

Moreover, as was reported by this newspaper in January, the government may reveal the overall official data related to the total deposits it had as on December 30, 2016 after March 31, 2017, almost three weeks after the results of the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls are out.

With the demonetisation issue having slowly ebbed, any revelation of the data now may prove counter-productive for the government at the polls in the politically crucial state, sources pointed out. More so as cash availability may not be a problem now in cities, but in rural areas, cash crunch is still being faced.

In such a scenario, the government’s “victory” in the war against black money in the form of demonetising currency worth Rs 14 lakh crore is fast turning out to be a pyretic one.