I think this move was more towards promoting a cashless economy than towards fighting black money. A large number of people are being forced to enter the bankin

I think this move was more towards promoting a cashless economy than towards fighting black money. A large number of people are being forced to enter the banking system this way, and bringing in a lot of money with them. The state bank of India alone has acquired ₹38677Cr. or 5.7 billion USD in just 3 days since the announcement. And this is just one bank, and much more will come soon. There has been a push towards digital citizenship right from the beginning of this government. The first move was a reversal on the party's stance towards UID or Aadhar - an ID based on the biometric database of the entire Indian population. The party moved from being opposed to the UID, to supporting and even pushing it ahead. Then we saw a push towards payment banks such as Paytm, and a push towards every citizen to get a bank account. The government even opened an API for these payment banks to exchange money amongst themselves. I think the way it works is that users can now get IDs similar to email addresses, like abc@paytm or xyz@pockets and can exchange money similar to sending email, regardless of the wallet or bank account they use. The demonetization is just one more step in the big project of digitising the Indian citizenship. The next step could be linking all bank accounts to the UID, and enabling payment authentication based on the biometrics from the UID, essentially making your UID your only bank account number. This is in a way also a global experiment, as if a country such as India can implement a biometrics based ID/Authentication system, integrate them with the payments system and eliminate cash; that achievement in itself would serve as a big push towards a global cashless economy. As far as the black money is concerned, there are already a lot of people willing to exchange old notes for new ones in return for a 20% or so commission. This is done by showing the money as savings from poor people, exchanging the notes in their name, paying them a small cut and getting away with the new, "white" money. The question is how much can be exchanged this way. Someone with a few thousand dollars over the allowed amount may not have much problem getting the money converted this way, but those with stockpiles having millions of dollars stacked away would definitely feel some pain. There are already stories of people dumping cash in garbage and of cash found floating in oceans. A journalist from Kanpur published about the demonetization move about weeks ago, so I am guessing a lot of big parties involved would also have known about in advance, and laundered their money in time. I don't know how successful this move would be in curtailing black money, but it is already bringing returns for the Indian banking system.