An Evaluation of Cashless Transactions During Pre-and Post-Demonetization Era in India

Abstract

On 8 November 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced �demonetization� to weed out black money from the country. The move, which saw Rs 500 and Rs 1000 denominations� currency notes being banned, wiped out 86% of India�s currency overnight. The primary purpose of the research paper is to evaluate and compare the cashless transactions during the pre- and post-demonetization periods in India. For this purpose, we used the variables such as NEFT, RTGS, and Mobile Banking transactions in terms of inward and outward transactions in private, public, and all banks in India by using a non-parametric test Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test. The data are collected from the database of RBI for the study period of June 2012 to March 2021 which is further classified as the Pre-Demonetization era (June 2012 to October 2016) and Post-Demonetization era (November 2016 to March 2021). The study results show a significant positive increase during the post-demonetization period in all classifications of banks for all the selected instruments of cashless transactions. The present study contributes to the existing literature as it attempts to understand the drastic change in the trends of cashless transactions during the post-demonetization era. � The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.