The RBI which prints the banknotes knows how much cash is in the system. I've heard a lot of nonsensical justifications of demonetization. This is by far the the worst.
> but with 6 years of hindsight doesn't seem as bad. It kicked off India's digital economy
Kick starting India's digital economy did not require bringing the physical economy to a fucking standstill.
> UPI payments went from $1.5B in October 2016, to $10B the following month.
Do you have a source for this? NPCI has very different figures: https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics
Value of UPI transactions in October 2016 was 48.57Cr, rising to 100.46Cr in November and 700Cr in December. In November 2022, the figure is 11,90,593.39Cr.
> This triggered mass adoption of phone payment apps,
Define mass. In 2016 smartphone penetration in India was ~24%.
> In most tier-1 and tier-2 cities in India, you don't need cash or a credit card to survive.
Ah, the endless queues, the needless suffering, the lost jobs and destroyed lives, all made up for by the fact that the urban middle class now has the convenience of UPI!
> Today banks don't accept any significant amount as cash deposits and there are strict caps on annual cash transactions.
Which to repeat myself, did not require bringing the economy to a fucking standstill. And limitations on value of cash transactions aren't a new idea and predate demonetization.
> Overall, the "demonetization" event of Nov 2016 was imho a success as far as the government's objectives were concerned.
99.3% of the demonetized currency was returned and six years later, the amount of cash in the economy has doubled. It takes a special kind of willful ignorance to claim this was a success.
