The Minister of state for Finance Pon RadhaKrishnan informed parliament that Income tax
department has unearthed undisclosed income of Rs 7,961 Crore after demonetization. The
amount excavated covered the period from November last year to March. Earlier, I-T
Department detected undisclosed income of Rs. 13,715 crores through surveys in 2016-17
as stated by former Minister of State for Finance, Santosh Kumar Gangwar in August, 2017.
RadhaKrishnan also said that the income tax department conducted searches on around 900
groups and seized assets worth over Rs. 900 Crore. He also submitted the data about Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN). As per the data available with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), after demonetisation a total amount of Rs 18.70 Crore FICN has been seized by the state police. This punctures the claim made by our Prime Minister of curbing the counterfeiting of currency.
In another set of data, as many as 1,695.7 crore pieces of Rs 500 denomination note were
printed till 8 December. The amount spent on production of Rs 500 notes was Rs 4,968.84
crore, he said. The minister also informed that the RBI printed 365.4 crore pieces of Rs 2,000
notes. The cost incurred is about Rs 1,293.6 crore. Similarly, Rs 522.83 crore have been
spent on printing of 178 crore pieces of Rs 200 notes. So, a loss of more than Rs. 5000 crores
in printing new currencies.
To fight the menace of black money, the government had on 8 November, 2016,
demonetized old 500 and 1,000 rupee notes and asked holders of such notes to deposit the
same in bank accounts. The I-T department had then launched Operation Clean Money to clamp down on unaccounted money funneled into bank accounts, post demonetization.
In phase two, launched in May, the tax department had undertaken a rule-based
comprehensive risk assessment framework to classify cases with different levels of risk.
As per the classification, one lakh people were identified under the high risk and category, 7.54
lakh under & medium risk 5.95 lakh under risk and 3.41 lakh under & very low risk.
As we can see, the crusade against black money through demonetization gave ambiguous
results. Due to sudden change in currency, the existing counterfeit notes became useless.
But, hundreds of people lost their lives. Many hundreds got deprived of proper medication
and treatment. Thousands had to go several days without food in the stomach. Lakhs lost
livelihood and millions suffered. A lot of undisclosed money was detected and then
extracted. But, the million-dollar question is that why the extracted amount is so less than
that of the amount detected previously? Whom government is saving this time? Only time
can tell.
