By MADHU AGRAWAL
It refers to Reserve Bank of India RBI warning that refusing to accept ten-rupee coins can end up in facing legal action. It is a common knowledge that people in general do not like having bulky ten-rupee coins also because fake ten-rupee coins are much in circulation.
There must be a policy whereby coins and currency-notes in same denomination may not be simultaneously in circulation. Presently denominations of rupees one and ten are two such denominations for which RBI issues both coins and currency-notes.
Minting of unpopular ten-rupee coins should be immediately stopped and plastic-notes of ten-rupee denomination having much longer life should be issued as was announced long back by the then Union Minister of Finance Namo Narain Meena on 12.03.2013 in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.
On the contrary, RBI must immediately stop printing one-rupee currency-notes since these have never been in actual circulation ever since these were re-issued on 06.03.2015 after a gap of about two decades only for bureaucratic craze of having signature on currency because only one-rupee notes bear signature of a secretary-rank officer of Government of India while all other notes bear signature of RBI governor.