India’s central bank launches new campaign against cash

from Norbert Häring

India’s central bank will withdraw the largest banknote from circulation. The then largest note is only worth about as much as the smallest in the euro area. The move is intended to force people to use electronic money instead of cash. With this, they can be better monitored and controlled and the financial and IT industries get their percentages and data with every purchase. India, as a favorite guinea pig of the global cash abolitionists, often provides the blueprint for what is in store for us.

The Reserve Bank of India announced on 20 May that it will withdraw the 2000 rupee note, worth the equivalent of almost 23 euros, from circulation by 30 September. The new largest banknote will then be the 500 rupee note worth about 5.7 euros.

Clearly, this makes the use of cash very unwieldy and forces many traders and buyers to switch to digital money. By using digital money, a bank account becomes a logbook of a bank customer’s life. This helps to monitor and control people by use of computer algorithms. Sanctions can be imposed in the event of unacceptable or simply suspicious behaviour.

In 2016, the central bank, already under the current Modi government, had declared all larger currency notes invalid with only four hours’ notice. They could only be brought to the bank. With this radical measure, the central bank and the government had plunged many millions of people into severe and often existential hardship.

The cash shortage, which lasted for months, was aggravated by the central bank’s simultaneous replacement of the 1000 rupee note by the physically larger 2000 rupee note, which did not fit into the slots of the ATMs.

This 2000 rupee note is now to be abolished without the 1000 rupee note being reintroduced. It is obvious, that this inconsistent reform policy is pure harassment of cash users.

India has been a member of the anti-cash organisation Better Than Cash Alliance since 2014. Its key members, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Mastercard, already had a major influence on India’s anti-cash and anti-people banknote reform in 2016.

Indian-born long-time Mastercard boss Ajay Banga, one of the key warriors and strategists in the global “war on cash” that Mastercard declared in 2005 was elected president of the World Bank in May at the suggestion of the USA.

The European Central Bank stopped printing the 500-euro note in 2016. This was preceded by propaganda pressure from the USA. Those who exerted this pressure, such as the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, demand that in the long term only the smallest euro notes remain in circulation, as is now being practised in India.