Mumbai: Ten years to the day since Prime Minister Narendra Modi went on television at 8pm and voided ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes, the two numbers that best measure the exercise point in opposite directions.
The notes scrapped were worth ₹15.42 lakh crore, or 86.9% of the value of all currency in circulation. By the time the exchange window shut, ₹15.3 lakh crore — 99.3% — had returned to the banking system, RBI figures show.
Currency in circulation stood at ₹17.77 lakh crore that week. By October 23 this year it was ₹43.16 lakh crore, a rise of nearly 143%, according to Finance Ministry data. RBI's annual report puts currency in circulation at ₹41.68 lakh crore at the end of 2025-26, up 11.9% in a year.
The currency-to-GDP ratio tells a similar story. It was 12.1% in 2015-16, fell to 8.7% in 2016-17, climbed to 14.4% in the pandemic year of 2020-21 and is back near 12% in 2025-26, roughly where it started.
On counterfeits, RBI's latest annual report records 2,29,746 fake notes detected in the banking system in 2025-26, against 2,17,396 the previous year. ₹500 notes accounted for 1,41,907 of them, up 20.5%. Fake ₹20 notes rose 47.4%.
The one clear shift is digital. UPI volumes have grown every year and now form a rising share of GDP, the same RBI data show.
Two of the stated aims of November 2016 are easier to test than the rest. Black money held as cash was to be flushed out. It was not: 99.3% of the scrapped notes came back, and currency in circulation has grown faster than the economy for most of the decade.
The RBI's own numbers do not settle the argument about what demonetisation achieved. They do show what it did not change: the Indian habit of holding cash.