How India's cash ban failed even to create a bank savings culture

For most Indians, the defining experience of demonetization was losing access to their bank accounts

The Indian central bank’s final tally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2016 demonetisation drive, intended to take money derived from tax evasion out of circulation, showed that 99.3 per cent of outlawed high-value banknotes had been returned. That’s a severe loss of face for officials, who had argued that holders of the cash would rather destroy it than return it to banks, providing a windfall for the government.

The authorities managed to produce several other defenses of the initiative, however. One in particular was appealing to financial markets: The notion that, in Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s words, “demonetisation appears to have