Jaitley pushes for 'plastic' currency

IANS 02 June 2015

After inaugurating a newly-minted facility to make special paper for currency notes at Hoshangabad in Madhya Pradesh a day before, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday pushed for greater use of plastic money.

"The developed world has moved substantially to plastic currency and payment gateways. I think, there is a need on this for India. Our determination is also there to gradually take steps and move in that direction," the minister said at a conference on Indigenisation of Currency here.

To popularise the use of plastic money, the government had launched the RuPay debit card in 2012 through the National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI). The card enables electronic payments at all banks and financial institutions, competing with MasterCard, Visa and American Express.

At the same time, Jaitley also pushed for currency notes to be made in India from scratch.

On Monday, he inaugurated a paper-making line for bank notes at Hoshangabad and dispatched a consignment for printing Rs.1,000-denominated currency notes to the state-run security press at Nashik in Maharashtra.

Referring to the initiative here, Jaitley said: "It is about time we started printing our own currency with our own ink and paper. This is not mere symbolism. It also represents a thought process -- there is a desire to bring back the Indian manufacturing to a particular level."

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Dr Anantha K Ramdas

1 decade ago

For reasons best known to Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley did not make any reference to the "experiment" and market "reaction" to actual plastic or polymer currency notes that has been reported to be in circulation in selected cities, as per former Deputy Governor, Dr Chakravorty. This was widely reported in newspapers, more than 2 years ago.

after this, there has been no further news on the polymer currency notes. More than 30 countries are using this and next year, UK plans to use polymmer notes, in stages.

So far neither the Ministry or the RBI have clearly spelled out their plans in this regard, though, we could seek full assistance and cooperation from Australia, the pioneer.

Would RBI or Finance Ministry care to clarify this issue? Issue of polymer currency notes would be first step to stop fake currency notes in circulation too.