Hyderabad: Terming the move to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes as “hasty”, AIMIM President Asaduddin Owaisi said on Wednesday it has created a panic situation and landed the poor and middle-class in deep trouble.
He also urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to immediately “recall” his decision.
The Hyderabad Lok Sabha member said only two per cent of people in India deal in cashless economy, while the financial transactions of the remaining 98 per cent are on cash.
People such as daily wage workers, drivers, plumbers, and maids earn their livelihood by cash, he noted.
“It has been done in a hasty way and now you have all these middle-class, poor people, labourers, agriculture labourers, drivers who are in deep, deep trouble. It’s a panic situation,” Owaisi said.
“This is going to cause huge panic, turmoil. It has already caused turmoil in markets. It has spread panic among the poor and common man,” he said, adding, people who get their salary in cash now don’t know what to do.
In January, the Centre was anyway going to implement the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and thus there was no hurry for the government to take this decision, he added.
Slamming Modi’s contention of issuing Rs 2000 notes, Owaisi said the ‘nano tracker’ which the government claims will be present on the notes, is untested and not used anywhere in the world and that it is only a waste of public money.
“It (the move) will definitely hurt the poor voter base of BJP that is who are small traders. The government should immediately recall its decision … or should give people some breathing space,” he added.
Owaisi claimed that according to a study done by the National Investigation Agency, about Rs 70 crore per year enters the country as fake Indian currency notes and that at present Rs 400 crore worth of fake notes were in the market.
“This is only 0.025 per cent of the total money as RBI has currencies worth Rs 16 lakh crore in Indian markets. And the Prime Minister wrongly used this aspect as an excuse to scrap the high denomination notes,” he said.
PTI