From the archive record
Hundreds of customer queue up outside a bank to exchange their old Rs 500 and 1000 notes in Delhi. Thousands of people flocked to banks for exchange or deposit of monetised currency notes of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000. Long queues can be seen at bank branches across India. People started arriving even before the banks opened. Narendra Modi may have shocked the nation with his Nov. 8 announcement, but the prime minister’s move was hardly unprecedented. India has pulled select denominations of its currency twice before. The first was when Rs1,000, Rs5,000, and Rs10,000 notes were taken out of circulation in January 1946, a year and a half before the country won independence from the British. The Rs10,000 notes were the largest currency denomination ever printed by the Reserve Bank of India, intro