India's Demonetization Disaster: Modi Likens Critics to Pakistan

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has accused his critics of his demonetization decision of “brazenly standing in support of the corrupt and the dishonest” and equated their criticism with the “firing at the borders by Pakistan in a bid to provide cover to infiltrators”,  according to the Indian media reports.

Diverting Attention:

Modi's attempt to use Pakistan to divert his people's attention from India's internal problems is not new. In fact, it's part of a pattern that seems to work in India. But why is it? What makes so many Indians so gullible? To answer this question, let us look at the following quote from Indian writer Yoginder Sikand's book "Beyond the Border":

"When I was only four years old and we were living in Calcutta (in 1971)...it was clear that "Pakistan" was something that I was meant to hate and fear, though I had not the faintest idea where and what that dreaded monster (Pakistan) was. What I heard and read about the two countries (India and Pakistan)--at school, on television and over radio, in the newspapers and from relatives and friends--only served to reinforce negative images of Pakistan, a country inhabited by people I necessarily had dread and even to define myself against. Pakistan and Muslim were equated as one while India and the Hindus were treated as synonymous. The two countries, as well as the two communities were said to be absolutely irreconcilable. To be Indian necessarily meant, it seemed to be uncompromisingly anti-Pakistani. To question this assumption, to entertain any thought other than the standard line about Pakistan and its people, was tantamount to treason."

Having been brought up with the misguided notion that Pakistan is evil incarnate, it seems that a large plurality of Indians viscerally hate Pakistan, and also hate anything that is likened to their western neighbor.

Such tactics may serve the politicians well but they do not solve India's long-standing problems that have put Indians among the most deprived people with the world's largest population of poor, hungry and illiterates.

Modi's hasty demonetization decision is also indicative of the rash decision-making by India's Hindu Nationalist leader. It's dangerous for stability in South Asia.

Demonetization Debacle:

Mr. Modi's blunder in hasty demonetization of large Indian currency notes has brought untold suffering to the people of India. The instant removal of 85% of cash from circulation in a cash-based economy has been harshly criticized almost universally by experts around the world.

Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma has said it's Mr. Modi’s “clumsy exercise of state power” and it won’t achieve its ostensible aim—cracking down on so-called “black money” salted away by tax dodgers, according to Sadanad Dhume's op ed in Wall Street Journal.

Kaushik Basu, a former chief economic advisor to the government of India and former chief economist at the World Bank, has called it “poorly designed, with scant attention paid to the laws of the market.”

Forbes magazine's Steve Forbes has called Modi's demonetization decision "sickening and immoral". Wall Street Journal's editorial page has described it as "India's bizarre war on cash".

Here's an excerpt of how the Economist magazine describes the effects of Modi's "botched" demonetization decision on life and economy of the nation:

"Cash is used for 98% by volume of all consumer transactions in India. With factories idle, small shops struggling and a shortage of cash to pay farmers for their produce, the economy is stuttering. There are reports that sales of farm staples have fallen by half and those of consumer durables by 70%. Guesses at the effect on national output vary wildly, but the rupee withdrawal could shave two percentage points off annual GDP growth (running at 7.1% in the three months to September)".

Summary:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's hasty demonetization decision has exposed his rash decision-making style. It has already caused untold suffering for ordinary Indians. Mr. Modi's decision processes have also raised serious questions about the formulation of Hindu Nationalists' Pakistan policy.  Fears of miscalculation by Mr. Modi's inner circle about Pakistan's response to any major provocation could result in serious consequences for the entire region.

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Views: 552

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 24, 2016 at 7:32am

China and India GDP figures tell a story, just not a true one

Nikkei Asian Review 

http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/China-and-India-GDP...

I was curious about how Prime Minister Narendra Modi's surprise move to withdraw 500- and 1,000-rupee bills could impact the Indian economy, so I read a Dec. 8 report on the Indian central bank's decision to keep interest rates unchanged.

In the report, a term that was unfamiliar to me -- gross value added -- piqued my interest. The article said the central bank had downwardly revised its GVA-based growth forecast for the year through March 2017 to 7.1% from 7.6%.

Doing some research, I found that a country's GVA is the total of the value of goods and services produced in all industries and similar to GDP in terms of being a measure of production. The Reserve Bank of India, the central bank, does not put much faith in GDP data and uses GVA instead to assess the country's economic health.

In early 2015, India switched its method of calculating GDP from a formula based on supply-side prices to one using demand-side prices. The result was a sharp increase in India's GDP growth rates. The growth figure for the July-September quarter in 2014, for instance, was upgraded to 8.2% from 5.3%.

Based on the new GDP calculation formula, India's economy grew by 7.6% in 2015, outpacing China's 6.9% expansion. The switch has helped India cultivate an image as the new star performer among emerging countries, replacing China.

---------

But the RBI argues that the old formula for calculating GDP, which uses supply-side prices in computing the total value created through production, is more suitable for accurately evaluating the country's economic performance.


-----

Which data is most useful for understanding how a country's economy is faring depends on the country's industrial structure, which evolves over time.

As for India, Yuji Kuronuma, who heads The Nikkei's bureau in New Delhi, says he mainly follows corporate lending, tax revenue and sales of Unilever's lifestyle products, but also keeps an eye on auto sales and airline passenger numbers.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 24, 2016 at 9:58am

#India tops the world slavery chart with 18.4 million #Indians (1.4% of population) held in #slavery . http://www.indonesia-investments.com/news/todays-headlines/global-s...

India tops the world slavery charts with 18.4 million slaves followed by China's 3.4 million and Pakistan's 2.1 million.

In terms of percentages, North Korea tops with 4.37% of population in slavery followed by Uzbekistan's 3.97% and India's 1.4%. 

The number of modern slaves (45.8 million according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index) is 28 percent higher than the number that was reported in the 2014 edition. However, this difference is mainly caused by a different methodology and data compiling process applied during research. The 2016 index is based on 42,000 interviews in 25 nations
Cambodia is the country with the highest amount of modern slaves in the Southeast Asian region. According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index 1.6 percent of the Cambodian population is victim of slavery. However, in absolute terms, Indonesia leads the ranking in Southeast Asia
Combined, there are 26.6 million victims of slavery living in India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan. Together, these five countries account for 58 percent of total global slavery
The Walk Free Foundation is an Australia-based human rights group
Most modern slaves - nearly two-thirds - can be found in Asian countries. This is attributed to the huge number of people living in Asia, while this continent is also well integrated into the global supply chains

http://www.indonesia-investments.com/news/todays-headlines/global-s...

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 26, 2016 at 7:46am

How #India broke its #economy (on purpose). #Modi #Demonetization #BJP http://fortune.com/2016/12/26/india-demonetization-rupee-notes/

The same night that Donald Trump stunned pundits and became America’s President-elect, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi dropped a bomb of his own: At midnight, his country’s 500- and 1,000-rupee notes would become “worthless little slips of paper.” He was taking those notes (worth about $7.37 and $14.74, respectively), amounting to 86% of India’s currency, out of circulation. Indians were given until Dec. 30 to swap their old bills for new ones.
Modi warned that the surprise demonetization might involve short-term pain, and it has: The new bills weren’t ready, nor were the nation’s few ATMs, which had to be reconfigured to distribute them. The economy all but ground to a halt as millions spent their days waiting in bank lines (dozens, according to reports, died doing so). The cash crunch has led others to resort to bartering, and Goldman Sachs has shaved 1.5% from its 2017 GDP forecast for India.

Many are skeptical the scheme will achieve its original aim—eradicating the untaxed “black money” that fuels corruption. But there’s another likely benefit: 90% of transactions in India involve cash, and the lack of it has boosted alternatives. Bitcoin and digital payment use have surged (fewer than 2% of Indians have credit cards). India may be on the way to a more efficient, cashless economy—it’s just going to be a bumpy ride.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 2, 2017 at 10:01am


#Demonetization pushed #India factory activity into contraction in Dec 16, biggest month-to-month decline since 2008

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/02/demonetization-cash-crunch-pushed-in...

Indian factory activity plunged into contraction last month as a cash crunch following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's currency crackdown severely hurt output and demand, a survey found on Monday.

The Nikkei/Markit Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index fell to 49.6 in December from November's 52.3, its first reading below the 50 mark that separates growth from contraction since December 2015.

It was also the biggest month-on-month decline since November 2008, just after the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered a financial crisis and brought on a global recession.

"Having held its ground in November following the unexpected withdrawal of 500 and 1,000 bank notes from circulation, India's manufacturing industry slid into contraction at the end of 2016," said Pollyanna De Lima, economist at survey compiler IHS Markit.

"Shortages of money in the economy steered output and new orders in the wrong direction, thereby interrupting a continuous sequence of growth that had been seen throughout 2016."

The output sub-index at 49.0 was its lowest this year, though the rate of contraction was only slight.

The new orders sub-index which measures both foreign and domestic demand was also knocked to its weakest in 2016.

Contractions in momentum were reported across all major sub-indexes in the survey, such as purchasing activity and employment, highlighting the blow to the economy after the government's demonetization drive.

Modi's decision to scrap high-value banknotes as part of a crackdown on tax dodgers and counterfeiters removed 86 percent of the currency in circulation virtually overnight, denting consumption in a country where the vast majority of people still rely on cash for day-to-day activities.

Economists have begun slashing GDP forecasts and some of the more pessimistic views are that growth will halve from the 7.3 percent year-over-year rate clocked in July-September, especially as consumer spending accounts for over half of India's output.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 7, 2017 at 10:42am

#India #demonetization: #FMCG sales down 1-1.5% in Nov. Hero #motorcycle down by a third. Credit growth at 30-yr low

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21713842-benefi...

MOST economists might hazard a guess that voiding the bulk of a country’s currency overnight would dent its immediate growth prospects. On November 8th India took this abstruse thought experiment into the real world, scrapping two banknotes which made up 86% of all rupees in circulation. Predictably, the economy appears indeed to have been hobbled by the sudden “demonetisation”. Evidence of the measure’s costs is mounting, while the benefits look ever more uncertain.


As data trickle through, so is evidence of the economic price paid for demonetisation. Consumers, companies and investors all wobbled in late 2016. Fast-moving consumer goods, usually a reliable growth sector, retrenched by 1-1.5% in November, according to Nielsen, a research group. Bigger-ticket items seem to have been hit harder. Year-on-year sales at Hero Motocorp, the biggest purveyor of two-wheelers, slid by more than a third in December.


A survey of purchasing managers in manufacturing plunged from relative optimism throughout 2016 to the expectation of mild contraction. Firms’ investment proposals fell from an average of 2.4trn rupees ($35bn) a quarter to just 1.25trn rupees in the one just ended, according to Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a data provider. As a result, corporate-credit growth, already anaemic, has reached its lowest rate in at least 30 years (see chart).

All this amounts to “a significant but not catastrophic” impact, says Shilan Shah of Capital Economics, a consultancy. Annual GDP growth forecasts for the fiscal year ending in March have slipped by around half a percentage point, to under 7%, from an actual rate of 7.3% in the last full quarter before demonetisation. Other factors, such as the rise in the oil price and the surge in the value of the dollar after the election of Donald Trump, are also at play.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 7, 2017 at 10:42am

#India #demonetization: #FMCG sales down 1-1.5% in Nov. Hero #motorcycle down by a third. Credit growth at 30-yr low

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21713842-benefi...

MOST economists might hazard a guess that voiding the bulk of a country’s currency overnight would dent its immediate growth prospects. On November 8th India took this abstruse thought experiment into the real world, scrapping two banknotes which made up 86% of all rupees in circulation. Predictably, the economy appears indeed to have been hobbled by the sudden “demonetisation”. Evidence of the measure’s costs is mounting, while the benefits look ever more uncertain.


As data trickle through, so is evidence of the economic price paid for demonetisation. Consumers, companies and investors all wobbled in late 2016. Fast-moving consumer goods, usually a reliable growth sector, retrenched by 1-1.5% in November, according to Nielsen, a research group. Bigger-ticket items seem to have been hit harder. Year-on-year sales at Hero Motocorp, the biggest purveyor of two-wheelers, slid by more than a third in December.


A survey of purchasing managers in manufacturing plunged from relative optimism throughout 2016 to the expectation of mild contraction. Firms’ investment proposals fell from an average of 2.4trn rupees ($35bn) a quarter to just 1.25trn rupees in the one just ended, according to Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a data provider. As a result, corporate-credit growth, already anaemic, has reached its lowest rate in at least 30 years (see chart).

All this amounts to “a significant but not catastrophic” impact, says Shilan Shah of Capital Economics, a consultancy. Annual GDP growth forecasts for the fiscal year ending in March have slipped by around half a percentage point, to under 7%, from an actual rate of 7.3% in the last full quarter before demonetisation. Other factors, such as the rise in the oil price and the surge in the value of the dollar after the election of Donald Trump, are also at play.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 11, 2017 at 8:24am

Even #Trump Building Isn’t Immune to #India’s Real Estate Woes After #Modi's #Demonetization http://bloom.bg/2jrHJcW via @business

by Pooja Thakur Mahrotri
January 10, 2017, 1:00 PM PST January 11, 2017, 1:20 AM PST
Land prices may decline 25 percent, homes 20 percent: analysts
Cash component of home purchase often as much as 50 percent
After trying for four months to sell his apartment in a western suburb of Mumbai, Meher Verma decided to cut the price by 10 percent. With property demand plummeting in the wake of November’s sudden ban on high-denomination notes, he’s not sure the reduction will do the trick.

“I was hoping to sell my house soon,” said Verma, who put his two-bedroom property in Andheri on the market for $400,000 in September. “Now it looks like I might have to cut my price or wait much longer for the market to improve.”

Real estate has long been a place where Indians have parked cash, often using money on which taxes haven’t been paid. Now, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s crackdown on so-called black money and the underground economy, real estate is taking a hit. The rate of home sales has fallen by about half since the government acted in early November, according to an estimate from Khushru Jijina, managing director of Piramal Fund Management Pvt. in Mumbai, who cited discussions with developers. Home prices may decline 20 percent and land prices could plummet as much as 25 percent, according to analysts’ projections. 

“Those who were looking to buy property as an investment vanished overnight from the market after the cash ban,” said Aubrey Carvallo, a Mumbai broker who has never seen demand in Mumbai so low in his two decades of working in the industry. He’s been unsuccessfully seeking buyers for eight apartments with prices starting at 15 million rupees ($220,000). “They are thinking of moving to stock markets and other financial assets, as real estate prices are set to correct in the coming years with the government crackdown on unaccounted money expected to continue."

India’s largest developers, including DLF Ltd. and Lodha Developers Ltd., say they’re taking a hit on sales. Even an association with the U.S. president-elect hasn’t helped stoke sales at Lodha, which is building a Donald Trump-branded apartment tower in Mumbai’s Worli district. The 75-floor Trump Tower Mumbai includes a 24-hour resident manager and a fractional membership to a private jet service. The company has sold 226 of the 396 units in the project from its launch in 2014 through last June, said Lodha, which added that it limits the sale of its inventory at the Trump Tower.


Lodha said in an e-mailed response to Bloomberg News that while it has notched sales of more 3 billion rupees for all its properties since November’s demonetization, sales would have been higher without the policy change.

“No doubt that sentiment for real estate will be subdued over the next three to six months,” said Jijina at Piramal, citing the most pressure on luxury projects India-wide and in secondary cities such as Ahmedabad, Indore and Jaipur. Markets such as the region around the New Delhi area “where some developers took only cash will be in severe trouble,” he said.

India’s S&P BSE India Realty Index, comprising 10 property stocks, has dropped 8 percent since the cash ban on Nov. 8, compared with a 2.5 percent decline in the broader S&P BSE Sensex Index.

India withdrew 86 percent of the country’s banknotes in the nation’s biggest crackdown against corruption in almost four decades. Unaccounted-for money makes up as much as one-fifth of the Indian economy, according to Ambit Capital Pvt. 

Demonetization of high-value currency notes may especially hurt luxury market and land transactions because the cash component ranges from 30 percent to 50 percent of the value of such deals, said Mumbai-based Pankaj Kapoor, founder of Liases Foras Real Estate Rating & Research Pvt.

“Land prices could drop as much as 25 percent once corruption is reduced and black money is out of the equation,” Kapoor said in an interview.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 11, 2017 at 8:38am

#India vehicle sales dropped 19% to lowest level since 2010 after #Modi's #Demonetization http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-01-11/it-s-hell-on-tw... … via @bfly

What sort of auto market could be dealt the biggest blow in 16 years by a change in rules on banknotes? Ask Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Vehicle sales in December slumped 19 percent from a year earlier to 1.2 million, their lowest level since 2010. If that sounds like an outsized impact for a class of consumer goods that are mostly not paid for upfront in Western countries -- let alone bought with hard currency -- you can take it as a salutary reminder that India's isn't like any other automotive market.The drop was overwhelmingly driven by vehicles that are so peripheral in developed markets, they're often forgotten -- motorbikes and mopeds.
TWO WHEELS GOOD, FOUR WHEELS BAD

In the U.S., the 501,000 two-wheelers sold in 2015 came to about 2.9 percent of total vehicle sales. Even in China, roughly three passenger cars are sold for every two motorcycles. In India, more than seven two-wheelers were sold or exported last year for every passenger car.So when investors think about the country's growth to become the world's third-biggest automotive market by 2020, it's worth reflecting that about 90 percent of the increase in unit sales over the past five years has come from bikes, scooters and mopeds -- an extra 5 million, compared with less than 200,000 for passenger cars.
Two for the Show
Motorcycles and mopeds have accounted for 90 percent of the growth in Indian automotive sales since 2011

Why should this distinction matter? The main reason is embedded in those December sales figures: Just as the wider spread of vehicle finance gives the European and U.S. automotive industries a different character to that in China, so the importance of two-wheelers gives the Indian industry unique qualities that are easily underestimated. This tripped up no less an industrialist than Ratan Tata, who created an expensive white elephant for Tata Motors Ltd. when he bet the country's middle class would trade in their two-wheelers for the low-cost Tata Nano car.The core sales demographic is (like India itself) less affluent, more rural, and has less access to the sort of finance products that make Western automotive markets as responsive to movements in interest rates as they are to shifts in selling prices.KEY SALES DEMOGRAPHICRural poorEmissions rules have some unusual quirks, too: While passenger cars are being brought into line with current European clean-air levels by 2020, mopeds and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws still commonly use the dirtiest two-stroke engines -- a situation that ought to be a risk factor for manufacturers if rules are ever homogenized.So if you're looking for bellwethers for the Indian industry, it could be worth paying a little less attention to Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. and Tata Motors and a little more to their smaller-cc cousins Hero MotoCorp Ltd. and Bajaj Auto Ltd. If you're impressed by Maruti's 18 percent year-on-year jump in sales volume in the September quarter, take a look at Eicher Motors Ltd., whose sales of Royal Enfield motorcycles were 42 percent higher in December than a year earlier.Even without two-wheeler sales, the country's rapidly growing auto market would be a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, though, it's a mistake to forget that in India, small is still beautiful.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 16, 2017 at 10:30am

#IMF revises #India GDP growth down to 6.6%. Says #India no longer fastest growing economy. #DeMonetisation #Modi

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2017/01/16/india-is-no-longer-th...

Canceling nearly 90% of cash in circulation cost India the mantle of world’s fastest-growing large economy in 2016, the International Monetary Fund said, though it categorized the slowdown as temporary.

India’s growth slowed to 6.6% last year from 7.6% in 2015, according to the fund’s latest World Economic Outlook, which estimates that China’s economy grew by 6.7% in 2016. The fund expects India’s expansion to bounce back to 7.2% this year and accelerate to 7.7% in 2018. China, meanwhile, is projected to continue decelerating, to 6.5% in 2017 and 6.0% the year after.

The IMF said it trimmed its 2016 forecast for India by one percentage point “primarily” because consumers tightened their purse-strings after November’s currency invalidation.

The fund’s sister institution, the World Bank, doesn’t think that was enough for India to lose the global growth crown, however. In the latest update to its global forecasts, released last week, the bank lowered its estimate of India’s 2016 growth to 7.0%—down from its earlier prediction of 7.6% but still ahead of China’s 6.7% growth.

None of these comparisons is exact. The IMF and World Bank both follow India’s practice of presenting output growth for the fiscal year, which ends March 31. China’s numbers—as with those of nearly every other large economy—are for the calendar year.

Still, the downgrades reflect deep uncertainty about India’s economic health since Nov. 8, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi stunned the country—and the world—by declaring all of the country’s high-denomination bank notes null and void for transactions. The move, aimed at flushing out stacks of cash amassed by businessmen and crooked bureaucrats, has driven families to cut back on spending, companies to let go of workers and investors to put projects on hold.

Earlier this month, India’s Central Statistics Office said it expected growth for the financial year to come in at 7.1%. But that projection was calculated using economic data only through last October, before the currency move was announced. More-recent data weren’t—and in some cases, still aren’t—available to statisticians.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 17, 2017 at 6:01pm

#India set for slowest growth period as #Modi's #demonetization dents #economy. #Achhedin #BJP

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/17/india-demonetisation-news-india-coul...


India seems set for four consecutive quarters of sub-7 percent growth for the first time since at least 2011, as the government's demonetization drive triggers a shortage of cash, Societe Generale said.

The country's Central Statistics Office amended the way India counted its gross domestic product (GDP) numbers in January 2015, amending the base year to 2011-2012 from 2004-2005.

Under this new series, which dates back to June 2011, India experienced three consecutive quarters of growth below 7 percent between December 2012 and June 2013, according to Kunal Kumar Kundu, India economist at SocGen. If Kundu's forecasts turn out to be accurate, this would mark the first time growth will be below the 7 percent mark for four quarters in a row for the series.

A combination of crimped rural demand, falling capacity utilization and weakening business confidence could result in a far lower growth rate than India would be comfortable with, Kundu said in a note on Friday, starting with the quarter that ended Dec. 31.

SocGen slashed India's fiscal 2017 growth rate to 6.6 percent on-year from 7.3 percent previously. For fiscal 2018, which ends March 2019, the bank expects growth to be 7.2 percent on-year, down from an earlier projection of 7.7 percent. 

"We also see the potential revival in already anemic private investment taking far longer than we originally anticipated," Kundu added. 

More than 50 days have passed since India introduced its demonetization program in November, impacting 86 percent of India's currency in circulation. The government recalled existing 500 ($7.35) and 1,000 ($14.70) rupee notes and replaced with newly printed 500 and 2,000 rupee notes.

Initial data released in the aftermath showed the drastic slowdown in factory activity, in line with consensus.

Reuters reported the Nikkei/Markit Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index fell to 49.6 in December from November's 52.3, its first reading below the 50 level that separates expansion from contraction, since December 2015. Meanwhile, consumer prices rose at annual rate of 3.41 percent in December, their slowest pace since November 2014, said Reuters, and well below the Reserve Bank of India's 5 percent target by end of fiscal 2017.

Analysts reckon subdued consumer prices would leave the Reserve Bank of India with more room to cut rates. SocGen estimates two rate cuts of 25 basis points each for 2017.

SocGen also pointed to a study by the All India Manufacturers' Organization (AIMO), which showed micro and small scale industries suffered 35 percent job losses and a 50 percent decline in revenue in the first 34 days since the demonetization program. By March 2017, those numbers could be as high as 60 percent drop in employment and 55 percent fall in revenue, according to AIMO. These industries usually are very reliant on cash transactions.

The study pointed out factors that contributed to the impact included "zero cash inflow, rules curtailing cash withdrawals, staff absenteeism, a weaker rupee, (and) choked fundraising options," among others, Kundu said. 

In his New Year's eve address, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced various procedures aimed to cushion the blow from demonetization. They included special provisions for senior citizens, villagers, entrepreneurs and small businesses.

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