Modi’s cashless payment dream: Meet the people paying for it
In a country where 70 per cent of people live in villages and less than one in five own smartphones, the digital economy can seem a strange priority
“Most people here can’t operate smartphones. Even if they could, most of the time you can’t charge your phone. And even if you can, there’s no internet access. In most villages nearby, they don’t even have running water. Cashless. Seriously? Why is it even a priority when there’s so much else to fix?” fumes Gopal Shivram Chauhan, who grows rice and lentils on his 9 hectares of land in Hirve, a small village just 150km from Mumbai.
Chauhan employs 20-25 farmhands during the sowing and harvesting seasons. He pays his workers a daily wage of about 100 rupees (HK$11.4). Since agricultural workers are desperately poor, they all expect to be paid daily. But he rarely has any cash these days since Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the withdrawal of Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes – which constitute 86 per cent of the money in circulation – in his war on “black money”, as unaccounted wealth is called in India.
So Chauhan these days often finds himself paying farm labourers in kind with crops, relapsing into a barter economy, while his prime minister has been spiritedly espousing the cause of hi-tech cashless transactions through digital platforms and banks. Modi has rolled out a bouquet of incentives to encourage people to buy online, organised a lottery to reward those who do, and launched an e-wallet app that will enable transactions through biometrics.
But only a four-hour ride from India’s heaving financial capital of Mumbai, Hirve – with no bank, no electricity for most of the year and no mobile phone connectivity – is a sobering reminder why a cashless economy is a distant dream in a country where 70 per cent of the population still live in villages and 73 per cent of the villages do not have a bank within a 5km radius.