The Central Bank’s Currency Department had last year destroyed a stock of 174 million unserviceable notes that had accumulated since 2005 using a new disintegrator installed in March last year to get rid of unserviceable currency notes received from commercial banks, the Central Bank said in its 2007 annual report.

"This machine has a shredding capacity of 900,000 unserviceable currency notes per day," the report said. The large stock of unserviceable notes that had built up was shredded since the new machine was installed from March 2007 to December 21, 2007.

The Currency Department has also moved to mobilize idle coins into circulation in the context of the cost of minting coins escalating significantly in recent times mainly due to rising international metal and energy prices.

To address this problem, the department launched an islandwide program to bring coins idling in households and religious places into circulation to save a significant part of expenditure in pounds sterling spent on minting coins.

The department was able to collect 28.6 million idle coins from eight districts through programs conducted through the school network using school children for the purpose.

Commercial banks and non-banks and public institutions have been involved in these programs, the report said.

The Currency Department had also melted significant stocks of slow moving aluminium coins of ten-cent and five-cent denominations in its vaults. The melting was done with the support of the Industrial Development Board which purchased aluminium ingots to be issued to respective buyers.

Around Rs.3 million had been realized from these sales.

Last year 1.9 notes per million notes in circulation suspected as counterfeit had been referred to the Central Bank for certification. The corresponding figure for the previous year was 2.23 notes per million.