The demonetization was extraordinarily bad at doing that. Turns out when you demonetize currency, the rich and corrupt can find ways around it, while it's the poor who lose their meager savings.

How did the poor lose their savings? I'm not from India, I just happened to travel there while that was happening.

My understanding was that everyone could wait in line to exchange their 500/1000 rupee notes for 100 or 2000 notes. The lines were long and the banks were frequently out of money to exchange from, but I thought they could also deposit it to their bank if they had one (letting the bank deal with the demonetized notes).

I know there are also a lot of unbanked in India, but presumably the period for exchanging demonetized notes was long enough to allow them to exchange any cash savings they had.. was this not the case?

Notes could only be exchanged for 18 days with fairly low daily limits per person. And that was only if you could find a bank that had new bills after waiting in line.

"presumably" is doing a LOT of work in that comment

A lot of people in India are unbanked