On demonetisation anniversary, a 'scrap to hardboard' story from Kannur

When the whole country is weighing the merits and demerits of demonetisation enforced a year ago, it is also time to be curious about where all the old - and discredited - 500 and 1,000 rupee currencies go? We have specific answer for at least a part of it: to a plywood factory in Kannur district in northern Kerala, not directly there though.

Western India Plywoods (WIP), the pioneering industry started in 1942, found it quite fit, and rewarding, to purchase a part of the thousands of tons of its newly acquired form of blocks from Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and process them into hardboard - an inventive product of the firm which it has been manufacturing ever since 1958.

Among its range of products, mostly wood-based, such as Plywood, Block boards, Flush door, Densified Wood, Wood flooring, Shuttering and Marine Plywood, Aircraft Plywood, some of them patented and many of which WIP supplies to premier users including electrical, textile and chemical industries and railways, hardboard has worldwide users, and the new grade has been exported to South Africa and Saudi Arabia.

From the huge stacks of currency collected and stored in the RBI office in Thiruvananthapuram, the RBI itself first pulverized them and converted them into small slabs before handing them to WIP who paid a price of Rs 128 per tonne. The so converted slabs are processed to pulp form by boiling well and grating through defibrator which is then mixed with the wood pulp conventionally used for making hardboard. The currency pulp took the place of the newsprint pulp commonly used, and forms just six per cent of the total mix.

The hardboard made out of this mixture is harder and of better quality: when such 'rupee' value is added, no wonder the product gets richer, has higher quality and is sold as a premium brand. Company officials claim the market has come to like this product and, needless to say, it is sold at a higher price than the standard product.

One month into the cancellation of the twin currencies itself, WIP's plant, which has a work force of 1200, had started receiving the RBI processed blocks and over almost a year now the company has, say its officials, received 50 trailers of the raw material totalling 800 metric tonnes.