Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien on Sunday said that the Union government’s demonetisation exercise had failed after a Reserve Bank of India report showed an increase in fake currency notes in the country.

The number of fake notes of Rs 500 more than doubled during the financial year of 2021-’22 as compared to the previous fiscal of 2020-’21, O’Brien highlighted in a tweet citing data from the central bank’s latest annual report. During the same period, the number of fake notes of Rs 2,000 saw an increase of 54.6%.

“Namaskar Mr PM Narendra Modi,” O’Brien wrote on Twitter. “Remember demonetisation and how [Trinamool Congress chief] Mamata Banerjee swiftly took you on? How you promised the nation demonetisation would wipe out all counterfeit currency.”

On November 8, 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes would cease to be legal tender in India from that midnight. Modi had said that the decision had been taken to “fight corruption, black money and terrorism”.

The Rs 2,000-notes and Rs 500-notes with a new design had been introduced after demonetisation.

In the annual report released on Friday, the Reserve Bank of India stated that between April 2021 and March, 13,604 fake notes of Rs 2,000 were detected. In the previous one-year period, 8,798 fake notes of the denomination had been found.

The number of Rs 500 fake notes jumped from 39,453 in 2020-2021 to 79,669 in 2021-2022, the report said. However, fake notes in the denominations of Rs 50 and Rs 100 declined by 28.7% and 16.7%, according to the RBI.

Congress MP Rahul Gandhi and his Shiv Sena counterpart Priyanka Chaturvedi also tweeted on Sunday highlighting the rise in the number of fake notes.