On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan <[email protected]> wrote: > > The scale isn't much, but the quality was something else. Experts took hours > to tell apart fake from real. In effect it doesn't matter - the current > design of Indian notes will need to be taken out of service - a cost of > hundreds of billions of dollars.
I doubt very much that replacing every banknote in a country, even one as big as India, would cost anything above 2 orders of magnitude less than that figure. I'd guess even 1 billion dollars is stretching it. Banknotes have an average life of about 2 years (according to http://www.delarue.com/ProductsSolutions/BanknoteProduction/TheBanknoteLifecyc/), so the cost wouldn't be much above what is already spent on replacing current banknotes. Andre
