‘Going cashless, a pipe dream for most of India’

As many have gone all out to bring new customers into the fold, as part of India going on a cashless drive, members of the business community, people on the street and industry professionals express their concerns over whether the transition is as easy as it sounds – on both the societal, and economic fronts. The ground reality seems to be that businesses across the city have been hit, and they have been hit hard. 

Speaking to DTNext, Varun Jain, who runs a pharmaceutical firm tells us, “A lot of transactions that occur in the unorganised sector, depend on hard cash. Take that out of the equation and business gets hit. Take into account, every link in the supply chain – from the wholesalers who need to ship their consignments in bulk, to the manpower they employ, the freight transport service that brings us the consignments and the labourers employed to carry out the unloading, and everyone in between. You cannot use the mobile wallet concept with them as those services are more or less directed at the B2C level. 

The B2B segment has been ignored in the backdrop of such a huge decision where your currency has become useless in the blink of an eye.” For the common man, the move to a digital wallet hasn’t been easy either. Meenu Susanna, an advertising professional says, “I have been using mobile wallets for a while now, but purely for taxi and mobile recharge services. And that’s pretty much the only use I have for them. 

For every other necessity like provisions or food, if I am at a supermarket, I can always swipe my debit or credit card. What everyone has comfortably put on the backburner is the fact that there has been no concentrated effort to educate senior citizens or even the under-banked individuals as to how to go about setting up a mobile wallet account or even train them in e-banking. My old aunt has still been resisting the idea of e-banking as she has her concerns about security and she also finds it hard to remember multiple passwords, and get up to speed with things like OTPs and virtual keyboards.” 

Many banks have now implemented the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system, which uses QR codes to complete banking and merchant transactions, which has also come as a relief to many customers. However, according to a cyber security expert who spoke on condition of anonymity, not many merchants are fully aware of how to use this system, and still rely on credit or debit cards.