Over three months after the Government's decision to demonetise Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 currency notes, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley says that normalcy has been restored in a short period.
“It was perhaps one of the biggest exercises of demonetisation and remonetisation in the world. Experts said it could take anywhere between seven months to one year for the situation to be normalised. But it was done in a few weeks without any major incidents,” he said at the Foundation Day function of Security Printing Minting Corporation of India Ltd today.
Praising the efforts of the currency printing presses, Jaitley said this was done as the presses of the Reserve Bank of India and SPMCIL have worked over time.
Meanwhile, addressing the event, Praveen Garg, Joint Secretary in the Finance Ministry and Chairman and Managing Director of SPMCIL, noted that the company has become debt free and it also plans to issue bonds this year.
To normalise the currency situation, post demonetisation, he said that the currency presses of SPMCIL transported 60 million Rs. 500 notes that amounted to Rs. 21,500 crore through air.
Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das also highlighted the important role of SPMCIL in remonetisation noting that workers worked in additional shifts to print currency and the notes were airlifted to different parts of the country.