Reading beyond sweet little lies: Demonetisation failed, let's admit it

Despite frenzy of distractions, an unimpassioned look at numbers reveals that little was achieved

Despite the frenzy of distractions since, by now you have likely heard the news that demonetisation failed. As NDTV’s Sreenivasan Jain put it in Truth vs Hype, the news sent the government into “a spiral of deflection, of moving goalposts and of swamping us with cherry-picked data”. He’s being very polite, avoiding the accurate and efficient word: “lies”.

Take this blatant example from the 31 Aug 2017 Ministry of Finance release titled “Demonetisation immensely beneficial to Indian Economy and People”:

The Government had expected all the SBNs to come back to the Banking system to become effectively