Geetanjali Krishna: Lingering woes of demonetisation

One would have thought that some of the brouhaha over demonetisation would have died down five weeks post Narendra Modi’s historic November 8 announcement. But there seems to be no end to people’s woes in these cashless times, and the fallout of demonetisation continues to linger, costing us in time, energy and good, old-fashioned irritation.

At the beginning of December, I requested our house help Suchitra to accept her salary through a bank transfer. She’s young and quite enthusiastic to try new things, so she readily assented. “My husband and I both got accounts in a government bank after we finally managed to get our voter cards made a few years ago,” she said. “I’ve made a couple of deposits, but this will be the first time I’ll withdraw some money… This might give us the impetus to save a little.” I transferred the amount with my smartphone, ruminating that this switch to a digital mode could simplify my life tremendously, saving the bother of withdrawing a lump sum and doling out salaries in cash.

Little did I know. Three days later, Suchitra asked me for time-off in the morning to withdraw some money. “I’ll be back by lunch,” she promised. Instead, she returned late in the evening, fretting and fuming. She’d spent the whole day at the bank, she said, but still hadn’t been able to withdraw money.

“First, my husband and I stood behind about 60 people outside the bank, waiting for our turn,” she narrated. Many of them were there for the second day in a row, she said, as the bank closed its gates when its cash supply for the day ran out. When they reached the top of the queue three hours later, they were told that since neither had submitted their Aadhaar cards to the bank, they couldn’t take out any money. “I found it strange that the bank had never asked for our Aadhaar cards while accepting deposits but was applying all sorts of rules and caveats to make it hard for us to withdraw any money.” The bank manager had no time for people like her. “Some Good Samaritans took up my case and began pressuring the manager to help us,” she said. Eventually, the manager asked the couple to bring their Aadhaar cards to him the next day.

So Suchitra and her husband returned to the bank the next morning, carrying with them all possible documents that the bank could ask for. This time she told me that I should expect her when I saw her, as she didn’t know how long a job that should’ve normally taken her not more than 10 minutes, would take in these strange, new times.

“Well,” I said expectantly, when she returned four hours later, “did you get the money?” Suchitra replied they’d successfully updated their Aadhaar card information in the bank, and had received a token for their place in the line. “We’ll have to go back there at 5 pm to get the money now,” she said. She was too tired to work in the afternoon, so it became a second day off work for her, as far as I was concerned. Finally she triumphed, returning home that evening jubilantly waving her cash.

Meanwhile, I was left wondering about the economic loss suffered in terms of man days, as people like Suchitra from the country’s vast unorganised sector continue to brave long queues to withdraw their own hard-earned money from overworked banks. Has this war — supposedly on black money and counterfeit currency, but actually mostly on people like them — been worth it? I wonder….