And not use to trap people as a premier investigating agency recently did in the Buta Singh’s son case.
A friend, who is a teller in a nationalised bank, once gave me two 50-rupee notes and said one, was a counterfeit. I could not tell which one. He then let me into the finer points of detecting a genuine note. A customer had passed on the fake note among a bundle of notes and he had failed to detect it. He merely replaced it with a genuine note from his pocket.
“When a customer passes on a counterfeit currency note and does not appear to be guilty, we quietly ask the customer to change the note and the matter ends there.” The bank, he said, normally did not report the matter to the police, because of cumbersome procedures that it entailed. Even the management frowned upon a police case.
This is only one of the ways, fake currency notes get into circulation through banks, with or without the knowledge/connivance of the bank officials — and are sometimes even find its way to ATM machines. That, however, is an insignificant percentage of the total number of fake notes in circulation. Those involved in the fake currency rackets believe in circulating these notes in the open market and are occasionally arrested by the police. The Bhopal police have arrested six minor gangs, each carrying fake currency notes worth a few lakh of rupees, in the past five years. According to figures released by the Reserve Bank of India, the value of fake currency notes seized during the last financial year was 183.1 per cent more than that seized during 2007-8.
The Reserve Bank does not put a figure on the value of fake currency notes in circulation in India. However, according to a newspaper report, the CBI estimates that fake currency notes valued at Rs 1,69,000 crore were in circulation in India by mid-2008. This surely is no small amount.
The same newspaper report quoted CBI director Ashwani Kumar on the “leak” of an ultra-secret 2005 template being used for making Indian currency notes which was behind the near-perfect counterfeit notes. By template or design the CBI director meant details of what went into printing an Indian currency note – specially of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations – the type of paper, the ink and the silvery bar running down the note on one side.
This admission by the CBI director gives little credit to the country’s premier investigative agency. Even with the leak of the design to a neighbouring country, as he suspects, the printing and then clandestine flooding of such a large number of notes across India could not have been the work of weeks or months; it must be going on for years. What has the CBI been doing all this time?
What happens to the fake currency notes that are seized? One thought that these were destroyed. However, the circumstances surrounding the trap and arrest of Buta Singh’s son allegedly for accepting a bribe of Rs one crore suggested otherwise. According to the reports based on briefings by the investigating agency, CBI could not immediately cough up genuine currency notes worth Rs one crore (as a bait for Buta Singh’s son); so the amount was made up of fake currency worth over Rs 98 lakh and only a little over Rs one lakh in genuine notes. One wonders why fake currency is not destroyed, by making a suitable amendment in the law if the present statute does not permit it.
Buta’s son’s trap leads to another aspect to the use of fake currency notes. Section 489-B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) provides for imprisonment up to 10 years along with a fine to whoever “traffics in or uses as genuine, any forged or counterfeit currency note or bank note, knowing or having reason to believe the same to be forged or counterfeit.”
Members of the CBI team, who trapped Buta Singh’s son, did try to pass on counterfeit currency as genuine knowing full well that these were forged and should, thus, attract the provision of Section 489-B IPC, along with the CBI director who was supposed to have approved the plan. The IPC does not permit the traffic in forged currency-notes for laying a trap or for any other purpose.