Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, an early supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ban on 500- and 1,000-rupee notes to unearth black or undeclared money, now says he is worried that there is no end in sight to the crisis brought about by the massive cash crunch that has followed.
“Demonetisation was not our wish but it happened. More than 40 days after demonetisation, despite our best efforts, there are still a lot of problems and there appears to be no solution yet,” Mr Naidu told legislators and parliamentarians of his Telugu Desam Party in Vijayawada on Monday at a party function.
When PM Modi announced the notes ban on November 8, the Andhra Pardesh Chief Minister had taken credit for the idea, saying that he was the one who had repeatedly petitioned the Prime Minister to ban high denomination currency to weed out corruption.
Babu – was recently appointed to head a committee of Chief Ministers to script a roadmap for the transition to a cashless economy – had tweeted then that the notes ban was a moral victory for the TDP.
Babu said people were struggling to access new currency to buy basic necessities but were unable to with banks and ATMs still running out of cash every day. “I am spending two hours daily to ease the problems caused by demonetisation. I am breaking my head daily but we are unable to find a solution to this problem,” he said.
He compared the cash crisis to the state’s political crisis of August 1984, when there was an internal party coup against then Chief Minister NT Rama Rao, Mr Naidu’s father-in-law. “Even that crisis was tackled within 30 days, whereas in this case even 40 days later, the problems continue,” he said.
