On the fourth anniversary of his controversial announcement of the demonetisation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday hailed the move, which, he said, had hit the black money and increased transparency in the economy.
The sudden move of Modi on November 8, 2016, had invited widespread criticism from the Opposition and economists. Modi took to Twitter saying, “Demonetisation has helped reduce black money, increase tax compliance and formalisation and given a boost to transparency.”
The Prime Minister said these outcomes have been greatly beneficial towards national progress.
On the occasion, the ruling BJP said that in 2016-17, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) saw transactions worth Rs 6,952 crore while it increased to Rs 21 lakh crore in 2019-20. UPI is an immediate real-time payment system that helps in instantly transferring the funds between the two bank accounts through a mobile platform.
The BJP claimed that the corporate taxpayers’ returns in 2018-19 were 35% higher than the number of returns in 2013-14.
“During 2016-17, 8.03 lakh returns were filed by corporate taxpayers; this increased to 9.42 lakh in 2017-18”, the party said.
Operation clean money was launched after demonetisation. Self-assessment tax of more than Rs 13,000 crore was paid by targeted non-filers,” said the BJP.
Stating that demonetisation was good for the country, BJP national spokesperson Rajeev Chandrasekhar said it resulted in cleaning up of the economy, formalisation of the informal sector and revenue aggregation.
“Demonitisation had dealt a body blow to the systemic financial corruption and black money economy. Since then, it has simultaneously invigorated formal economy and brought unprecedented financial benefits to all sections of society,” he said here at a press conference.
On November 8 in 2016, Prime Minister Modi had announced to ban all currency notes of higher denomination of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 from midnight.
Consequent to this restrictions were placed on the withdrawal of money from banks or ATMs.
The BJP and the Government also claimed that the move had checkmated terror funding in India by way of stopping the supply of the black money.