Discussion: India to issue Plastic Coins

[Patney]

Proposal to introduce plastic coins
Reserve Bank of India has forward a proposal by a Mumbai-based engineer to mint coins in industrial grade plastics to the finance ministry for consideration.
Ravindra A Palwankar an engineer with Air India had submitted a proposal to RBI which was forwarded by the central bank to the finance ministry.
Governments across the world moving towards issuing coins in the nature of metal token with assigned value rather than the historical practice of matching the face value with metal value. As a result, the metal content in the coins no longer reflect the coin's value

[dheer]

Its an interesting news, lets see what happens and can we address the issues of counterfeit coins as it may be more easy and cheap to manufacture these.

[Coinsforever]

In my opinion such practice would be affective where cash transaction are seldom with high usage of cards and for less populated countries.

It will not be feasible for India at the moment.


Cheers

[Pabitra]

This is not a new idea. I think sometime in 2001, a senior officer in Department of Electronics, Mr K.N. Aggarwal actually went to the extent of filing a patent application.
The idea was to issue coins something like metro tokens with electronic RFID chip inside. The checking could be done by any machine which would do some 128 bit or so checking, like Bitcoins of today.
Only thing Mr Aggarwal could not understand that what coin boundary did he wish to operate at.
His proposal was to save on cost of metal and thus replace the smallest coin at that time, which was 25 paise.
The price of token was coming to be Rs. 35 which was 7 times higher than the biggest coin in circulation, namely 5 Rupees.

Engineers tend to get fascinated with technology without understanding economics.

[dheer]

Engineers tend to get fascinated with technology without understanding economics.

Couldn't agree more. Typically one tends to see things only in one dimension rather than all round aspect.