(ET)
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today said demonetisation was a shake-up which achieved its “principal objectives” of decreasing cash transactions, expanding the tax base and increasing digitisation.
“Confiscating” the money was not the aim, he pointed out. “Demonetisation was certainly a shake-up,” Jaitley said at the Bloomberg India Economic Forum here. “I think the demonetisation debate in India actually is being held at two different levels. The first level was ‘there’s an inconvenience caused, there are queues which have come up’. “(The second argument being) ‘Oh the money has come back into the system’. But that was the whole idea. The idea is not to confiscate money,” the finance minister said.
