Chennai : To educate the common man, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has come out with special television commercials, a micro website called paisa bolta hai listing features of genuine notes (http://www.paisaboltahai.rbi.org.in/), and even set up an exclusive currency literacy cell. “Apart from banks and enforcement authorities, we train individual retail establishments dealing with huge cash, free of cost,” said an RBI official. Recently, the Chennai cell trained the staff of Tasmac outlets in all 32 districts of the state to identify fake notes, he added. While 4,35,607 fake currency notes were detected by RBI during last year, the figure, just within five months of 2011, crossed half that number. From April to September 2011 alone, RBI detected 2,64,282 FICN notes in circulation. Keen to address the growing FICN menace, RBI is working in tandem with ministries and intelligence agencies to thwart activities that aim to destabilise the country’s economy. While the government has constituted a terror-funding and fake currency cell to focus on such cases and has empowered the national investigating agency to take up such cases, RBI is in the process of upgrading the security features in the high-value currency notes and strengthening the mechanism for detection of counterfeit notes by banks. Considering that there were 64,577 million pieces of banknotes (worth Rs 9,35,856 crore) in circulation as on March 31, 2011, the detection of forged notes last year was 6.74 pieces per million pieces of banknotes in circulation. Of the 4 lakh counterfeit notes identified last year, about 90 per cent were detected at bank branches, says a senior RBI official. In view of this, RBI has directed banks to process notes in the denomination of Rs 100 and above only through machines conforming to ‘note authentication and fitness sorting parameters’ prescribed by it. RBI is even trying to introduce polymer/plastic bank notes on a ‘field trial’ in select locations of the country. Detecting fake notes, mostly in the denominations of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500, is becoming difficult as Pakistan and India procure the paper for currency from the same supplier in London, say intelligence officials.
DC
