Quote:by P. SAINATH


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In Chikalthana village, on the edge of and merging with Aurangabad town in Maharashtra, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream of a cashless economy seems to have been realised. Nobody has any cash. Not the banks, nor the ATMs and certainly not the people queuing up in and around them in despair. Even the policemen sitting in the vans outside bank branches haven’t any.

But cheer up. They’ll soon have ink marks on their fingers.

In the State Bank of Hyderabad (SBH) at Shahganj within the walled city of Aurangabad, you can see equally desperate bank staff struggling to help their impoverished clients. There and in other branches of every single bank in the town, soiled notes worth crores of rupees  in denominations of Rs. 50 and Rs.100 – meant to be sent to the Reserve Bank of India for final destruction – are being reintroduced into circulation. The RBI knows of this but condones it through silence.

“What option do we have?” ask people working in these banks. “The public really needs small notes now. All their work and transactions have come to a halt.” As we speak to the staff inside, Javeed Hayat Khan, a small vendor, comes up to us from a queue that runs close to a kilometre outside the bank, on a Sunday. He hands us an invitation to his daughter Rasheda Khatoon’s wedding.

Quote:As several writers, analysts and official reports have already pointed out, the bulk of India’s ‘black’ economy is held in bullion, benami land deals, and foreign currency. Not in stacks of notes in grandma’s old oak chest. The chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes said so in a 2012 report  on Measures to tackle black money in India and abroad. The report also said (page 14, Part II, 9.1) demonetisation “miserably failed” on two past occasions in 1946 and 1978. Yet, this action is what the Bharatiya Janata Party government has repeated. The ‘Modi masterstroke’, a term contrived by assorted anchors and other clowns on television to hail an unbelievably stupid action, is spreading agony and misery in its wake across the countryside. If there’s been any stroke, it’s the one the heart of the rural economy has suffered.