Ten years ago this Sunday, Narendra Modi went on television at 8pm and told Indians that 86% of the cash in their pockets would be worthless by midnight. He promised that the pain would be temporary and the prize enormous. A decade on, India’s own figures show how little of that prize ever arrived.
The ban on Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes on November 8, 2016, was sold as a “grand sacrifice for cleansing our country”. It would break black money, corruption, fake currency and terrorism in one stroke. Indians took him at his word and stood for hours outside banks and ATMs. Small traders and daily wage workers paid most heavily. Then the promises began to fall away, one by one, and the justification shifted with them.
The cash came back
Mr Modi said in 2016 that high-value notes made up between 80% and 90% of the value of the country’s cash, and that the amount of cash in circulation was directly linked to corruption. By that logic, not much has been achieved. According to the Reserve Bank of India, the Rs500 note alone made up 85.5% of the value of cash in 2025-26. The Rs2,000 note that the government introduced in the middle of the drive has since been withdrawn, a tidy summary of the planning involved.
Reports of large cash transactions dipped briefly after the ban, then climbed past their old levels from 2023, according to India’s Financial Intelligence Unit. Most damning of all remains the central bank’s own finding, published in 2018, that about 99% of the banned money had come back into the banking system. The black money hoards that were supposed to go up in smoke either did not exist as cash or found their way back in.
“A government that promised to end cash politics now seizes more of it at every national election.”
Corruption did not budge
In his speech Mr Modi boasted that India had climbed to 76th in the global corruption rankings. In 2025 Transparency International placed it 91st, barely better than the 94th it held before he took office. The law against benamiProperty or assets held in someone else’s name to hide who really owns them. property, which he presented as part of the same fight, has produced seven police cases since 2017, and none at all in 2024, according to national crime records.
He also singled out black money in elections. Here the numbers run the wrong way. The Election Commission seized Rs304 crore in cash in the 2014 general election, Rs804 crore in 2019 and Rs1,067 crore in 2024. The commission puts some of that down to better enforcement, and that may be so. But a government that promised to end cash politics now seizes more of it at every national election.
Cash seized in India’s general elections
Indian rupees. Source: Election Commission of India.
The claim about Pakistan
Pakistani readers will remember another part of that speech. “Enemies from across the border run their operations using fake currency notes,” Mr Modi said, as he tied the ban to terrorism. It was a convenient line that placed the blame abroad and turned a monetary gamble into an act of national defence.
India has seen some real gains here, and they should be acknowledged. Detected counterfeit notes fell from 0.00071% of the total in 2014-15 to 0.00013% in 2025-26. But the share was always tiny, a poor reason to shut down an economy’s cash overnight. On terror financingMoney raised or moved to pay for terrorism., the Financial Action Task Force rated India’s performance only “moderate” in 2024, noting long delays in prosecutions. Of 1,530 people India was prosecuting between 2018 and 2023, it convicted 89. That is a conviction rate of about 6%, after a decade of being told the money trail had been cut.
Ten years later
What it never admitted
The most telling thing about demonetisation is how little accounting has followed it. India’s Supreme Court upheld the decision in 2023 by a majority, with one judge dissenting, but it ruled on the process and not on whether the policy had worked. The government quietly moved its goalposts towards digital payments, which have indeed grown fast, though they did not need a national cash crisis to do so. There has been no public reckoning of what the shock cost the people who could least afford it.
There is a lesson here for Pakistan as well. Calls surface every so often here to scrap the Rs5,000 note as a quick cure for undocumented money. India ran that experiment at enormous scale and at enormous human cost. Undocumented wealth does not sit in a suitcase waiting to be cancelled. It moves into land, gold and foreign currency, and the state only reaches it through the slow work of taxation and enforcement.
Mr Modi asked his country for 50 days. It has given him 10 years. The bold stroke on live television made for excellent politics, and the figures suggest it did very little else.
