Before demonetization, I used to transfer funds to my wife account who would in turn withdraw cash to pay domestic help, guard, newspaper stand, milk, vegetables etc.
After demonetization, our domestic help as well as guard is now accepting payment by cheque, Mother dairy (for Milk and Bread) & Saffal (Fruits & Vegetables) is on Digital Wallet. We have convinced the Newspaper guy to accept cheque (five months advance) too.
This month, I split the monthly expenses into my wife’s account and digital wallet with monthly expenses. My wife in turn has got my mom on digital wallet and transferring funds in her digital wallet for any miscellaneous expense.
Our local club on home delivery of food is accepting cheques and temple is open to donations via cheques. It is probably the only temple I know, which refused accepting donations in old currency notes after 8th November 2016.
One of our local grocery shops refused to take cheque or card who was more than happy to give us credit but will only accept cash. So we switched to another shop who was giving all facilities for payment (cheque & digital wallet). Due to the ability of this shop to accept digital payments, from an average 20K daily sale, it boosted to Rs. 80K daily sale. After two weeks the grocery shop who was not accepting digital payments, visited our place to inform us that now they are accepting digital payments.
Our Resident Welfare Association (RWA) accepts annual payments and of course there are many who doesn’t bother to pay RWA. However, thanks to demonetization. Literally, everyone who had defaulted not only paid their past dues, but also paid in advance for the next year.
I had broken my iPhone Screen so went to local mobile shop to get it repaired. At the time of payment I noticed I had exhausted my digital wallet monthly quota. As the shop was a mobile shop, they accept payment by credit card as well. However, in that case they would charge an extra 3% for paying by credit card. The vendor gave me an alternative to save 3% i.e., he opened his Digital Wallet Account and asked me to load it with my credit card.
My colleague was stopped by a traffic cop who fined him Rs. 100 for pillion rider without helmet. My colleague gave a Rs. 2000 note and the cop returned Rs. 1900. My colleague thanked him for the change and asked him if he is going to be here the next day as well with change. They both exchanged smiles which would have never happened without demonetization.
Even at my office Canteen where we buy our Lunch for Rs. 50. I was the first one to pay by Digital Wallet, finally completely cashless for me.
I recently did a Tweet chat on demonetization and its effects (as part of Digital initiative we do a Tweet Chat on various topics with industry leaders on Wednesday 11:00 to 12:00 follow #HCLILeaderTalks). Topics such as Financial Inclusion, effects on normal life, benefits, infrastructure, disadvantages to SME’s, problems faced by people at ATM’s etc. were discussed.
However, my purpose of writing this is that we are capable to change and there are indeed many benefits of a cashless economy over cash economy. If you weight the benefits of cashless economy, as a country we are moving ahead. So it is not impossible to live without cash.