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UP at the receiving end of counterfeit notes, courtesy ISI

Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow

The Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence, has so far restricted its activities in India to espionage, dumping of arms, ammunition and explosives, blasts, or prying into secret files. But what was unearthed by the Uttar Pardesh police recently portents to affect the economy in an insidious manner.

Brand new counterfeit currency notes are being pumped into the country by the ISI; in Uttar Pradesh, they are already in circulation in a big way.

A senior UP police official, on receiving a tipoff, used a decoy to purchase notes worth Rs 10,000 for just Rs 4,500 in Kanpur "Can you make out the difference between these and real notes?" he asked this correspondent, as he pulled out a few from his briefcase. And truly, there was no way a layman could discern between them and real currency notes issued by the Reserve Bank of India.

In fact it was only after the RBI confirmed that the particular series mentioned on the notes was never printed by it, that the police could say conclusively that the notes were absolutely fake. Remarked the police official, "We have reason to believe that these notes are being printed across the border: and highly sophisticated machines are being used for the job, otherwise such high precision jobs could not have been possible."

According to him, Nepal is being used as a conduit to channel these notes into India But even as he was not sure about the extent to which these notes were already in circulation in different parts of the country, he did not rule out the possibility of largescale and widespread circulation.

A top UP official termed it as part of Pakistan's obvious gameplan to destabilise the Indian economy. "Once you have an abundance of fake currency notes, systematically spilled all over the country, you can well imagine the damage it would cause to the economy," he pointed out.

However, to prevent this, the UP police have personally urged the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the whole affair thoroughly, "so that this menace could be nipped in the bud and the nation could be saved from this cunningly designed economic onslaught by the ISI".

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