If you are optimistic enough to see a more-cash 2017, you would need to wait till March.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley at a press conference yesterday has said, the currency scene is getting stabilised. However he didn’t indicate that withdrawal limit will be waived off anytime soon.
Most experts and economists have said that the easing of situation will depend on how fast new notes are fed into the system as well as people getting used to less cash transactions.
By the end of February, almost 80% of the demonetised cash i.e Rs 15.44 lakh crores will get back to the system that has been flushed out on November 8, 2016. The cash logistic industry executives who deal in depositing cash in ATM machines believe that the queues at ATMs won’t get any shorter before March because at the present situation only 10% of the total deposits are being made.
Navroze Dastur, managing director,
NCR Corporation, which installs and manages ATMs for banks, told ET: "Get cash not in the Rs 2,000 denomination, but in the Rs 500 and Rs 100 denominations into mass scale circulation fast.”
Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economic adviser of
SBI, told ET the next two months will see a lot of cash coming in. "Given that Rs 500 notes are now being printed and also given that RBI and the government are working overtime, we tried to deconstruct the most plausible date of when the cash crunch will get over. Our results indicate that by February-end, around 80 per cent of the currency could be back in the system under the best case scenario in terms of an optimal currency distribution (more small denomination notes). Clearly, it seems that within the next two months things would be pretty close to normal.”
