“HOW will I pay for my CT scan in the hospital? I do not have any small denomination money or a credit card,” bemoaned my friend Rajpal, aged 86. He lives alone and was due for a medical test on November 9.
At the stroke of midnight, the previous evening on November 8, 1,000 and 500 rupee notes were demonetized. Like millions of Indians, overnight Rajpal had to survive with small denomination currency notes of Rs 100, Rs 50 and Rs 10.
Friends bailed Rajpal out by lending him small denomination currency notes. He had tears of gratitude in his eyes.
Suddenly we were all needy. The debarred denomination notes, constitute 86 percent of the currency deployed in India. We were left with just 14 percent of the national currency to manage our expenses.
The government said that we could have limited withdrawals from our accounts in a phased manner, from banks and ATMs. Jeetlal, my neighbor’s son, visited a series of ATM machines. He returned forlorn. “None of them have cash in them,” he reported. Apparently, it was overlooked that the country’s 215,039 ATMs need to be recalibrated to deliver the new currency.
Senior citizens without credit cards and close relatives were the hardest hit. They did not have the energy to stand in the long serpentine queues to exchange their currency.
Villagers and farmers suffer. My attendant Premanth, hailing from Sayar village in Uttar Pradesh, sought two weeks’ emergency leave. “My family is in dire trouble. There is a bank in the market in Bhadhoi district four kilometers away, but my family is unable to exchange currency or draw money. They have no credit cards in the village. How will my family eat?” he asked, his voice choked.
About 67 percent of India lives in villages, where bank penetration is still low. There are a meager 86,425 bank branches and 40,345 ATMs serving over 800 million people in villages, i.e. about a million people per branch and 2 million per ATM.
Villagers walk five to 15 kilometers to get Rs 2,000 from a bank. Many banks just do not have the cash to disburse. Moreover, about 29 percent of villagers, especially women, are illiterate. They do not know how to sign checks or operate an ATM. Again, 236,000 Indian villages have a population of less than 500, where the banking sector is absent. India’s villages are a pure cash economy.
My driver Imitiaz bemoaned, “This is the time we sow the wheat crop in our village. My family has no money to buy seeds and fertilizer. I may have to go to help them.”
So suddenly I am confronted with the possibility of being stranded without my daily attendant and driver.
Ridhima, a receptionist, sought a little time to visit the bank to exchange old currency notes. However, the “little time” grew into four hours. “There were 50 people ahead of me in the queue. I needed the money desperately to buy groceries for my family. So I waited for four hours,” she explained.
Rajpal, Jeetlal, Premanth, Imitiaz and Ridhima are all simple salaried middle class citizens like me. They need their weekly withdrawals from the bank to keep their homes running and to feed their children.
In this way, India has become frugal. “I have only Rs 80 in my pocket. I wonder how I am going to buy lunch. Perhaps I will buy a sandwich,” my son announced as he left for work.
In the days following demonetization, people reduced their visits to restaurants and cinemas. Some have had to miss meals for lack of the new currency in their hands. Footfalls in malls and shops have slumped drastically. Sales have plummeted by half. Wholesale markets of grain and vegetables are grinding to a halt. Weddings are being postponed.
Around 40 persons, mainly senior citizens, are reported to have died waiting in the queues to get the new currency.
Demonetization of large denomination banknotes was a bold and necessary step in India’s fight against corruption. However, as I listen to the woes of the people with whom I interact daily, I cannot help wondering why the process was not better planned.
I also ponder whether it was right to withdraw 86 percent of the currency in one night without having adequate quantities of the new currency for mass distribution. The task of supplying new currency to the 7,935 towns and 640,867 villages requires rigorous logistics. This seems to have been neglected.
Demonetization was initiated with the laudable goal of cleansing the country of corruption. However, for now it is ordinary taxpaying citizens, who stand in time-consuming queues at banks to withdraw their own hard-earned money from their own bank accounts. If all Indians had paid their taxes over the decades, we would not have to swallow the bitter medicine of demonetization. It is a weird irony that we print Mahatma Gandhi’s picture on our currency notes, the demonetized ones as well as the new ones, but we do not heed his advice on integrity.
Hari Chand Aneja,
Mumbai, India
(The author is a 96-year-old former corporate executive who now keeps busy with charity work.)
