My disclaimer

This is my disclaimer.

Before start reading my blog, you should kindly go through this.

I am not an economist. I am a civil engineer by profession.

Before 8/11/2016, I seldom bothered about currency or RBI and not used to read anything related to them. Yep, that day, when our Prime Minister came to the TV channels around 8.30 PM and made that theatrical announcement, with all his trademark gesticulations and dramatic voice modulations, to demonetize ₹500 & ₹1000 notes and introduced ₹2000 note as a panacea for eliminating the hoarding and black money.

The curbs announced along with the above announcement and also the deadline of 50 days for replacement of the demonetized notes, just made me perplexed from a resource management perspective. I have rich experience in resources management, I was trained to perform that job by some of finest men in the profession. Then I love data mining and crunching, because I am lucky to have a couple of tough bosses who always insisted and encouraged me to give prognosis based on solid data rather than going peripheral and tangential.

So I googled to RBI web site. I am really amazed to see the wealth of information there. RBI website is really a gold mine of information for anyone who is interested in data mining. I don’t know who taken such a strong initiative to put everything at public domain so detail. May be Sri. Raghuram Rajan or any of his predecessors who believed in transparency and sharing information.

I feel quite sad that post demonetisation, the same RBI became non-transparent and non-communicative. It is really shocking to see that they gone to an extent to even purging the information, which they have already put in the public domain.

I heavily relied the data from RBI website for my blog. Finance Ministry website, NPCI website, published literature by reputed institutions and some credible media reports are also used by me.

My initial interest was limited to know whether how the demonetization of ₹500 & ₹1000 notes will affect the currency in circulation and whether these notes can be replaced in the above limited time. But as Prime Minister shifted goal posts and dates, I decided to little deep into the data mining. In that process, I learned many new lexicons like narrow money (M1), broad money (M3), reserve money (M0), CRR, SLR, PPI, etc related to economics. So I read about a lot of books, articles to understand these concepts to interpret the data.

The things unraveled through my research and learning really  made me shudder and perplexed. So I started tweeting about the demonetisation from 11th November 2016 onward. I received an overwhelming response from the twitterati. Many of them asked me to pen down my work and dont let it go down in the tweet storm. Thank you all for the inspiration and encouragement. Finally after a month, I decided to pen down my thoughts, analysis and prognosis about demonetisation with a rider that I am not an economist.

So if you notice any errors in interpreting the data and my understanding of the monetary economics, kindly intimate me through comments or email. I am obliged to do the necessary corrections with pleasure. This is a process of learning and unlearning for me, an entirely new field.

Welcome to my blog on demonetization!