Supreme Court ruling on note exchange window in July

Source – indiatimes.com

NEW DELHI: If you are still left with scrapped Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes, having failed to deposit them in banks by the December 30 deadline, you could hold on to them till July-end.

The Supreme Court said on Tuesday it would decide in July whether the government should be asked to open a window for those who could not deposit the scrapped notes in time due to genuine reasons or because of PM Narendra Modi’s promise in his November 8 speech for a window beyond December 30.

The Centre, through attorney general Mukul Rohatgi, struck a defiant chord and said there was no obligation under the ordinance to give any further chance to citizens to deposit scrapped currency notes.

The ordinance makes it a crime to possess scrapped notes.

With over a dozen petitioners narrating different reasons for their inability to deposit scrapped currency notes before December 30, their counsel complained to the court that the Centre had filed a general affidavit without responding to the peculiar facts of individual cases.

Rohatgi said the government’s stand was that there would be no further opportunity to deposit scrapped currency notes.

The Centre’s affidavit had referred to an individual’s case in which the petitioner had sought permission to deposit Rs 66.80 lakh in scrapped notes and said the petitioner failed to deposit the money as his bank account was not KYC-compliant.

Refusing to be drawn into individual attempts to get relief from the agony of watching wads of currency notes turning into waste paper, a bench of Chief Justice J S Khehar and Justices D Y Chandrachud and Sanjay Kishan Kaul said, “Our decision will be whether there will be another window or not. If yes, then all of them will get the benefit.”

Rohatgi said, “Even if the Supreme Court decides to open a limited window for remonetisation of scrapped currency notes, it has to be left to the government to ascertain the genuineness of the reason for failure to adhere to the December 30 deadline.”

The SC, while entertaining petitions seeking a window, had weeded out many petitions on its own, terming their claims about difficulty in meeting the December 30 deadline as “pure cock and bull story”.