Originally Posted by GUWonder

It's all due to one man. We all know how India operates, no less so when we know that trying to please "boss" is part of the issue and that changing rules rapidly lead to problems. A person running India would have to be an ignoramus to not realize how this would come with India being India yet again. The one man was willing to take the chances and run with this on the assumption that the objective was worth it and would be achieved easily without too much pain.

Amusingly, the vast majority of the demonetized cash seems to have already ended up back into bank channels and done so to a much, much greater extent than the government and its tools/cheerleaders expected. Apparently the government underestimated the ability of Indians to game the government's game and so has to keep changing the rules to try to stack the game even more in favor of the government than is already the case. And now the haystacks are so big and so many that the government's hunt for "black money" needles may end up more complicated than it was even before.

There are smart ways to encourage increased banking and strengthening of tax collection and there are desperate, thoughtless ways to try to do so. This is somewhere on that spectrum, but it's closer to the latter than the former. Credit and blame for this goes to one man and one man alone. He has the power and he knows India enough to have to own this move whether or not he or others want him to do so or not. The small financial hit and more major time-waste hit I face in India on my visits will have me pointing the finger of blame for it at the one man with the audacity to have made this demonetization situation what it is.