Greened money

thanks to the Reserve Bank of India (rbi), the colour of money now will not only be green, but will actually have a green edge. rbi governor C Rangarajan inaugurated a system in December 1996, whereby unfit or mutilated notes were turned into bricquets to be used as fuel. Rangarajan said with the installation of the shredding and bricquetting system, the rbi has adopted a pollution-free and environment-friendly form of destruction of spoiled notes.

It was long felt that the destruction of such notes needed a safe and less messy method of disposal which must be beyond manipulation and misuse. The present system, the first of its kind in the country, fulfills all these requirements. That the system was badly required, can be ascertained from the fact that every year, five billion non-issueable notes are withdrawn from circulation. All this amounts to around 4,500 tonne of solid waste generated annually by the rbi in the cash processing centres.

Procured at the installed cost of around Rs 9 crore from a German firm, the system, as opposed to the earlier process of incineration, is totally smoke-free and automatic.