Sweden is only the most visible case. Norway made refusing cash an offence. The UK gave its regulator statutory powers over cash access and a legal duty on 14 banks to fill gaps. Australia mandated cash acceptance at supermarkets and fuel stations, and last week declared its only remaining cash carrier as critical infrastructure.
Nobody legislates phone booths back, and that is what makes this worth noticing. When governments pass laws about a thing, hand it to their central banks and fund private companies to keep it running, they have concluded that it was infrastructure all along, and that the market had been dismantling it, while everyone assumed the decline was consumers choosing.
The mechanics were the same in all these countries. Moving cash is a fixed-cost network, so falling volumes raise unit cost. Rising unit cost closes the marginal ATM, closure removes access, and lost access pushes usage down further until the network is gone. No bank behaves unreasonably at any step, which is why the remedy everywhere was statute, not negotiation.
India’s position is the reverse, and for the better. Banknotes in circulation stood at over ₹41 trillion in March, up 11.9 per cent in a year — the fastest in five years. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) cash usage indicator put cash at 52-60 per cent of private consumption as of 2024, eight years after UPI. Deputy Governor S C Murmu told central bankers in Jakarta on August 18, 2026 that cash in circulation has not declined, least of all in rural India. Currency keeps growing at double-digit rates even as its transactions share falls, a combination that “complicates our planning for production and distribution capacity”.
That last leg is where the strain shows. The RBI plans everything up to the currency chest with precision; beyond it, getting notes into people’s hands is left to bilateral contracts between banks and their vendors, and the numbers are moving the wrong way. India has about 25 ATMs per lakh adults, against 68 in China and 90 in Brazil. Off-site ATMs fell by 7,567 in the last year, while on-site machines rose. A 32,000-machine operator went into insolvency last August.
What India needs is a framework while there is still time to do it calmly. Recognise the movement and processing of currency between the chest and the citizen as critical infrastructure, like the UK and Australia. Publish an access standard for distance and density, monitored by the RBI. Banks provide free withdrawals on an interchange the regulator sets, so any such standard will come with its economics, or it is an unfunded mandate that simply won’t be met.
Today, every note collected from a shop or a merchant returns to a currency chest for reissuing, and this is where the standard for a fit note is enforced. Extend the standard to cash centres near collection points – under RBI accreditation — so that good notes are cleared for re-issue locally, rather than making the full round trip, like accredited handlers in the Eurozone. Finally, establish a standing forum of the RBI, the Indian Banks’ Association and the industry, so that the next stress is seen while it is still a planning discussion.
India built the best digital payment rails with a regulator that set the architecture before the volume arrived and the physical rails deserve the same. India can write its own framework while there is currency demand and the industry that moves it is still intact, which is a far better position to legislate from. What remains is to bring the same deliberateness to the distance between the currency chest and the household.
The writer is chief business officer, CMS Info Systems, and president, Currency Cycle Association
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