Viral Sach: Can a new note of Rs 2000 light a bulb?

NEW DELHI: On November 8, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination currency notes will cease to be legal tenders from the midnight as part of a string of measures to fight black money. After demonetising the existing Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes the goverment has introduced new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 currency bills. With most people seeing these notes for the first time, there’s hardly a way to tell it apart from the possible fake currency. After the RBI's announcement of introducing new currency notes, a set of roumurs surfaced that new Rs 2000 notes will come with a GPS-chip to help government track illegal money transactions. However, the apex bank had dismissed such reports as “figments of imagination”. Now after a month, a video has gone viral on social media claiming that the new notes of Rs 2000 can store solar energy and light a bulb thereby. "The windowed security thread has the tendency to store solar energy. If a Rs 2000 note is kept under sunlight for 30 seconds, it gets charged," the one minute long video claimed "When wires touch the security thread, which has already been charged, the bulb attached to holder and wires, lights up," it further said. The video calls this 'method' a "new innovation that is present inside Rs 2000 notes." ABP News, in its Viral Sach segment, while trying to gauge the authenticity of this claim made in the video, kept a Rs 2000 currency note in sunlight for 30 seconds. Though we knew it doesn't store solar energy but to make it apparent to the viewers, we followed each and every step mentioned in the video and as expected the bulb didn't light up. According to experts, the security thread, embedded in the currency notes, is made up of noble metals which are nonreactive in nature to maintain their durability. Hence, it is impossible to light a bulb this way.