KATHMANDU, March 26 (Xinhua) -- India has proposed to Nepal that it was ready to exchange banned Indian currency notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees up to 4,500 Indian rupees (68.8 U.S. dollars) for individuals in Nepal, way below the amount legally allowed to posses in the himalayan country, a senior official of Nepal's central bank said.
Nepal has allowed Nepalese individuals and Indian nationals to carry such notes to maximum 25,000 rupees (382 U.S. dollar) in Nepal since January 2015. But Indian currency notes denominated up to 100 rupees are freely exchangeable in Nepal since long.
Although India had made arrangement of exchanging the banned notes in India since they were banned on Nov. 8, 2016, it has not yet made arrangement of exchanging such notes from Nepal.
Officials of Nepalese central bank and visiting officials of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) are holding discussion on the issue from Sunday.
"RBI officials have maintained that they could exchange the banned IC (Indian currency) notes up to 4,500 rupees possessed by individual in Nepal which we feel very low amount," said Bhisma Raj Dhungana, chief of foreign exchange management department of Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB), central bank of the Himalayan country. "But, we have requested the Indian side to exchange such notes up to the legally allowed 25,000 rupees."
According to NRB officials, two senior officials of RBI have come to negotiate on the matter and the two sides will continue negotiation until Monday.
Nepal's banks and financial institutions have held banned Indian currency notes worth 78.3 million rupees, according to NRB. But neither the central bank nor the government has any idea as to how much Nepalese individual citizens have possessed.
Nepalese traders involved in trade with India and the Nepalese migrant workers are supposed to have possessed such notes in abundant amount.
But Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI) President Pashupati Murarka told Xinhua that he believed the traders do not have much banned Indian currency notes.
"Due to uncertainty over exchange of banned IC notes in Nepal, many traders have made settlement of such notes they had possessed in their own way," he said.
He also asked Nepal's central bank to make arrangement of exchanging banned Indian currency notes to the maximum limit as much as possible.
