Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in early November cancelled the 500 ($7.3) and 1,000 ($14.6) rupee notes, which make up 86% of the country's total banknotes, and urged Indians to exchange them for new ones by the end of the year. For deposits over 250,000 rupees ($3,750), the data will be sent to the tax department for verification against tax returns. The prime minister hopes that rich fraudsters and corrupt officials will reveal how much wealth they have been hiding, and that Modi himself will show “the India everyone has dreamed of” by reducing the shadow sector (25 to 75 percent of India's GDP) and filling the treasury (only 1 percent of Indians pay income tax). Economists debate how much Modi's reforms will cost the Indian economy, calling them either a stunning success or a failure.

Hour-long queues at banks, broken ATMs, opposition marches – the country is caught off guard. Indians are an inventive people and get rid of banknotes in creative ways: they export gold abroad by the kilogram, pay salaries in old banknotes for many months in advance, hire poor people to exchange bills in portions, and they invent ways to remove the indelible ink applied by bank clerks from their fingers; the most desperate are even ready to burn some of the money, just so that it does not end up in the hands of the government.

Russians have historically been fascinated by India, but they see only Washington and Brussels as their equals, not their sweet, exotic, but still younger brother. And it lives a much more interesting life than our stagnant system. Modi made the fight against corruption central 2.5 years ago the theme of his election campaign, and his party won an absolute majority in the lower house of parliament (Lok Sabha) for the first time in 30 years. He himself was not caught in any fraud, and gained fame after he made the state of Gujarat an economic leader in the country. In addition to Modi's money reforms the civil service: now the jobs where Indian women began to rapidly gain weight, demonstrating their growing wealth, are easier to lose. Indian acquaintances say that they will vote for Modi again, because the problems are too deep to solve them in five years, but only he is trying to move things forward from a dead point.

India is a democracy, and both his own dissatisfied voters and the influential opposition can go against Modi. To propose an idea, implement it, and pay the price for mistakes is not an approach for us at all; it would be better to have stability in the fall of living standards, and TV will show a precisely caught minister or a billionaire colonel who was hired to fight corruption.

Narendra Modi and demonetization