It’s an intriguing asking “society can go cashless?”
The time when beefing up your wallet with dollars, pounds, rupees, etc. were a rage. Usage of card (credit or debit) was not a rage, but, it was matter of big businessmen or high profile; the person who has more than one accounts and those accounts are filled with deposited money from varied sources. Now time has change. It is a time when Martin Cooper’s invention Mobile Phone is now Smartphone, the Desktop replace with Laptop-so many things has changed from the time of filling wallet with cashes. So where is India standing on this verge of change-going cashless?
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The Changing Time:
Norway, Sweden and few other countries are smaller than India but have already implicated the cashless system in full effect. Now here’s lie the logic that a big country, specifically a subcontinent, like India can’t go cashless completely. They can cover a portion but not whole-like less than ¾th of pie eaten and remaining not. But this portion of eaten pie has increases in last few years. The various steps that are taken by Government are diminishing this large proportion not-eaten to less.
Two Popular Steps
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has put together few of the necessary infrastructure related to payment; many payment-providing services companies (PayTM, PayUMoney..etc) has come forward to help them. These companies’ steps are helping the small and medium business in adopting the cashless system. It should be remember that Indian economy is mostly driven by these small and medium businesses specially. Addition to these both is growth of RuPay and Immediate Payment Service (IPS). The National Payments Corporation of India (NCPI) has launched these both. RuPay is a debit or credit card launched by them which are issued by most of the major public sector banks; IPS is a service they launch to make the payment service more convenient and easier.
Another Popular Initiative
Another step taken to make the cashless payment more popular is Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana. It has decreases much of the unbanked population and increases the direct transfer of benefits and subsidies to the bank accounts.
The Reason for Taking the Steps:
All these steps are taken to curb the black money. But in reality it’s an uphill task. Like while declaring the Budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has declared the PAN Norm. Under this norm, buying jewelry in form of gold or gems the buyer need to presents their PAN detail. 80% of the buyers, according to All India Gems and Jewellery Trade Federation (GJF), of jewelry are from rural region; they don’t have a PAN number or even bank account, though at tortoise-rate it’s getting diminishing due to Yojana.
Not Biased
The problem of going cashless is not only a biased one. It has its own share in the metros too. Many of the shops are uncomfortable in receiving cashless-payment as payment. They prefer either cash or check; debit or credit card comes second to them.
Role of Technology
But it doesn’t mean that growth of cashless will not be encouraged. India holds the numero uno position in youth population which means adopting technologies in large and huge way. So it’s the future that holds the answer to “society can go cashless?”
It was not the technology that have been seeing a development in large; the World Wide Web is also seeing a development more than large. This virtual world is spreading its boundary to new dimension every these days. This extension is happening mainly due to appearance of types of sites like social networking, e-commerce, etc.
India has a large number of youth populations-as it was mentioned previously. This population is mostly inclined towards using technology for performing a daily chore. One of such chore is shopping. Due to advent of various shopping portal sites, they’re having their shopping spree by one click. For the payment purposes they’re using mostly the credit or debit cards.
There was a time when most of the population was scared of using their cards (debit or credit). This was for the weak protocol of protecting shopper id including the bank detail. But due to introduction of e-wallet, there are no more scared of losing their vulnerable banking details.
In other words, to summarize the whole article, it can be said that going for a cashless economy is not an uphill or impossible task; it only need usage of the available technology in proper way.