2013 Under previous government Replace subsidies with direct deposits in bank accounts of poor citizens[1]
2014 Under Modi Massive push to open bank accounts for poor people which seems to have bought banking to many households who never previously had one[2]
2015 Renegotiation of Tax treaties and Information sharing treating with tax heavens[3][4]
Window for hoaders of black money to declare it for a flat penalty[5]
2016 Demonetization
A more detailed step by step account http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/prime-minister-modi-surgi...
[1] http://www.voanews.com/a/india-replaces-subsidies-for-the-po... [2] http://qz.com/257548/the-response-to-modi-governments-first-... [3]http://swarajyamag.com/economy/campaign-against-black-money-... [4]http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=146245 [5] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/10-things-to-know-abou...
Better timing would have been to wait until adoption of the Government's own pan-Indian electronic payment scheme ('Unified Payment Interface'), including giving small vendors card reading devices.
Yes, the timing does mean that major political parties in UP would be hurt because their insane amount of hoarded cash is in trouble but really, is that a bad thing?
As pointed out in comments above, this step does make sense given what the govt. has been trying to do to fight black money in the past 2 years.
In fact Modi keeps mentioning that this is not the last of the steps and there will be more measures coming into affect soon. Keeping the hoarders scared was really needed here.
If you're on the ground in India, you can tell people are thinking twice before selling their properties for cash (it's very common for people to sell for 70/30 or so ratio for white and black money) / other hoarding activities.
On the other hand, demand for gold has gone up. That's definitely a more fungible form of black money than property.
Well, there are elections every year [1] in India in some or the other key states. Not denying what you are saying but any timing would raise political eyebrows. IMO average citizens have no problem with politicians drumbeating things that has positive impact.
[1] http://www.elections.in/upcoming-elections-in-india.html
What's more disturbing to me is the rumors I've heard from some wealthy friends' parents that they've already found loopholes to launder money through charitable trusts
This has existed forever. Cleaning up is not easy as most religions run their worship places under these trusts.
Politically very hard to deal with this situation.
I imagine for people like my parents, the cost of going to a bank and getting all their suddenly-demonetised banknotes exchanged (which we anyway had very little of) isn't too much. And when some restaurant, say, or a drugstore, is unwilling to accept one of the new 2000-rupee notes, we have credit/debit cards to fall back on. The fact that that people may not have Aadhaar[1] cards or voter ID cards stored safely somewhere, that not everyone has bank accounts which hold >99% (excuse the arbitrary figure) of the money they have, that not everyone has the ability to spend what might possibly be the better part of a day walking to $DEITY knows where the nearest bank is (probably to be turned away because they're out of cash or because the line is a kilometre too long) -- that the very act of going to a bank may not be as trivial or no-brainer-like to everyone as it is to oneself! -- is something we have to work very hard to even imagine. And the cash they have stored is, in many cases, all they have. (Remember what I said about not having a bank account?)
Cash, for us, is what we use for bags of chips and ice-cream and sheets of graph paper and ... bus fare, I guess? Cash, to someone living from day to day, is everything.
edit: yay downvotes, I can tick that off my list
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar