Demonetisation: This is how many Rs 2000 notes RBI had on November 8

India is a country of over 1.25 billion people. On November 8, Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to demonetise the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes and instead introduced a new currency- the Rs 2000 notes.

Naturally one would assume that the Reserve Bank of India would have the adequate number of the new notes so as to ensure that the entire population of India goes through the transition smoothly.

However, that was not the case.

As it turns out, on November 8, the RBI had only 2.47 million notes of the new Rs 2000. This basically means that on the day of demonetisation, the RBI had only Rs 4.94 lakh crore with it in Rs 2000 notes, which is approximately one-fourth of over Rs 20 lakh crore it had in scrapped currency notes.

This information became public as an RTI response to Mumbai-based activist Anil Galgali from the Reserve Bank of India. According to the response, the RBI had Rs 9.13 lakh crore in 1,000 rupee notes while Rs 11.38 lakh crore in 500 rupee notes, while it had 2,473 million pieces of 2,000 rupee notes on November 8 which had a value of over Rs 4.94 lakh crore.

This begs the question: Shouldn't RBI have been better prepared?