The E-Sylum:  Volume 10, Number 26, July 1, 2007, Article 17

INDIAN COIN SHORTAGE CONTINUES; COINS BEING MADE INTO RAZOR BLADES

Stephen Pradier forwarded this BBC news article about the shortage
of small coins in India:

"Millions of Indian coins are being smuggled into neighbouring Bangladesh
and turned into razor blades. And that's creating an acute shortage of
coins in many parts of India, officials say.  Police in Calcutta say that
the recent arrest of a grocer highlights the extent of the problem. They
seized what they said was a huge coin-melting unit which he was operating
in a run-down shack.

"'Our one rupee coin is in fact worth 35 rupees, because we make five
to seven blades out of them,' the grocer allegedly told the police.
'Bangladeshi smugglers take delivery of the blades at regular intervals.'

"Police say that initially the smugglers took coins into Bangladesh and
then melted them down, but as the scale of the operation has increased,
more and more criminals in India are melting them down first, and then
selling them as razor blades.

"To deal with the coin shortage, some tea gardens in the north-eastern
state of Assam have resorted to issuing cardboard coin-slips to their
workers. The denomination is marked on these slips and they are used
for buying and selling within the gardens. The cardboard coins are the
same size as the real ones and their value is marked on them.

"'We will commit an offence if these cardboard slips go out, but we have
to use them in our gardens because there are hardly any Indian coins in
circulation here,' said a manager of a tea garden in northern Assam.

"In Calcutta alone, India's central bank - the Reserve Bank of India -
has distributed coins worth nearly six million rupees ($150,000) to
overcome the shortage in the last two weeks, bank treasurer Nilanjan
Saha said.

"Shopkeepers ask customers to buy more to make it a round figure so
that small change does not have to be given out."

To read the complete article, see: Full Story

[So is anyone actively collecting examples of these cardboard money
substitutes for numismatic collections?  How about some of the razor
blades?  The time to gather these artifacts is NOW, while the event
is happening.  The U.S. Civil War era cardboard scrip and postage
stamp envelopes that I collected were only available because some
astute collectors in the 1860s put them aside.  If no such actions
are taken, future numismatists will only be able the read about these
items in old newspaper accounts, but will never be able to examine
the actual artifacts.  -Editor]

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization 
promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.

To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor 
at this address: whomren@coinlibrary.com

To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum