After five years of demonetisation in India, the opposition parties have slammed the Narendra Modi government, calling the decision a failed and draconian law.
Trinamool Congress parliamentarian, Derek O'Brien, in a mocking reference to the Modi government's decision to demonetise, shared a screenshot of five tweets sent by the state chief of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, on 8 November 2016 - the day Prime Minister Modi announced the currency ban.
At the time, Banerjee had criticised the federal government's move as a "draconian decision".
In other tweets, she criticised Narendra Modi and his government, branding the decision "financial chaos" and a "disaster let loose on the common people of India".
On Monday, Congress politician Priyanka Gandhi Vadra also took to Twitter to criticise the move, using the hashtag #DemonetisationDisaster. Vadra. who is also general-secretary of Congress, wanted to know why demonetisation has not achieved what it was meant to do.
Congress parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor posted a 35-second video and described demonetisation as "an impulsively conceived decision".
On 8 November 2016, Modi announced his government's decision to pursue demonetisation. He said that older INR500 ($6.8) and INR1,000 ($13.7) currency notes would be removed from circulation at that time.
Those were replaced by fresh currency notes in the denomination of INR500 and INR2,000. The public were given 50 days to swap their old banknotes with new ones.
At that time, former prime minister, senior Congress politician and noted economist, Manmohan Singh, called demonetisation a "monumental decision", predicting that it would affect India's GDP by at least two percent.
Five years later, several politicians and activists on Monday took to Twitter and expressed their anguish over Modi's government decision.
India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), in its annual report of 2016-17 stated that demonetised banknotes of an estimated value of INR15.28 trillion ($20.62Bln) (98.96 percent of demonetised notes), were received by 30 June 2017.
The Indian Prime Minister and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had expected some of the demonetised currency not to come back. Modi had once mentioned that "the 500 and 1,000-rupee notes hoarded by anti-national and antisocial elements will become worthless pieces of paper".
But the RBI later accepted that high-currency counterfeit notes reduced post-demonetisation. According to the central bank, "detection of fake INR500 and INR1,000 decreased by 59.7 and 59.6 percent (respectively) after demonetisation."
Several experts and surveys, however, also suggested that it was due to demonetisation that so many Indians embraced a digital mode for their financial transactions.
From close to 1.5 million digital payment acceptance locations in 2016-17, the number of Indian merchants accepting digital payment modes has increased to more than 10 million in three years, according to a report released in August 2019 entitled 'Fintech in India - Powering mobile payments'.