New Delhi: People have deposited nearly all demonetised Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency till December 30 which would mean that government may not realise huge bonanza. The government had initially estimated about Rs 5 lakh crore of the Rs 15.4 lakh crore rendered worthless by the sudden move on November 9 to remain undeclared as it may have escaped the tax net illegally.
With almost 95 per cent of the scrapped notes finding their way to banks, the government may at best gain around Rs 50,000 crore only by way of additional surplus transfer from the RBI, said Bank of America-Merrill Lynch in a report. “How much can budget 2017 raise from the demonetisation drive? Rs 1,500 billion, we estimate, down from Rs 2,000 billion earlier,” Bank of America-Merrill Lynch said in a note. It also nearly halved its estimate of the RBI dividend from black money not returned to banks to Rs 500 billion from Rs 950 billion, as the banks had collected over Rs 14 trillion out of the Rs 15.55 trillion in demonetised notes deposits by December 19, it said.
