If you’ve been to the bank recently to exchange your old currency and have found your replaced 100 rupee notes to be old but smelling nice, chances are you have been given notes that were taking off from general circulation and sent to the RBI for elimination.

It is being reported that the RBI is sending banks old 100 rupee notes which have not been destroyed but stored for a rainy day. Besides being crumpled and old, these notes smell bad. The banks are reportedly spraying them with insecticides and perfumes before handing them over to the customers.

As a normal practice, such soiled and damaged notes are usually returned to banks and sent to RBI offices where they are put into shredder machines and ferried to dumping sites.

50 days not enough to tide over cash crunch

There is no denying the severe cash crush after Rs.500 and Rs.1000 notes which formed about 86 percent of the available denomination, were stopped as legal tender by the government. The RBI it seems, is forced to dig out these old notes that were taken out of circulation due to wear and tear.

Although the Finance Ministry and the RBI insist that there is sufficient number of new Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 notes to replace the estimated Rs 14.5 lakh crore sucked out of the economy by the demonetisation, there is clear evidence of a shortage.

Long queues outside banks and ATMs continued for the ninth day on Saturday with people jostling to get cash to meet their daily needs.

While some attribute this to logistical issues -- the problem of getting the new notes to bank branches across the country -- others have made calculations, based on the printing capacity of the four currency presses in the country, to contend that the demand-supply mismatch will take anywhere between six and nine months to bridge.