DEMONITISATION – A flop show or a success story

DEMONITISATION – A flop show or a success story

The new policy by the BJP Government was no less than a bombshell on the Indian economy. Various justifications were given for its introduction that includes reduction of black money, stoppage on the terrorist funding and much more. Well before we could discuss whether the government is able to meet up what was expected, one must look into the hardship suffered by the citizens.

With the currency, the crunch came several problems like businesses and trades suffered that caused a huge setback to the Indian economy. Honestly speaking, these are the things most talked about. What were given sideline were the long queues, deaths, and disturbance in the law and order situation. In majority of the places, people took the law in their hands and in order to deposit the cash many even broke open the bank gates. Apart from these, pregnant ladies, children were all standing in the queue and many shut their shops in order to exchange their demonetized currency note that was a loss of the man-hours. This, in turn, gave birth to many corrupt practices like the illegal conversion of demonetized currency. Ironically, the policy did not aim towards but it ultimately aggravated the sufferings of the citizens, which the government was either ignorant about or preferred to remain silent on.

In the defense, all that was said by the government was that these hardships and sufferings were the prices that we need to pay to clean up the system. So is actually the system cleaned up after this? What about the fake new currency notes in the system? Even after the long wait for the ATM when finally people could get the new currency note, they are unable to use it. Due to the shortage of money, nobody was able to provide change for a two thousand-rupee note and this further hampered the transactions and many preferred to shut their shops.

After this, the government came up with a new idea- Digital India. Paytm, e-wallet was all promoted in full swing. But what is not brought to attention is that we still do not have well-defined privacy laws, which in short paves a way to the cyber crimes. If we start using our credit card or debit card everywhere we put ourselves at a much higher risk of being looted. There are even chances of card cloning. Also not to forget a majority of the credit cards are owned by foreigners and in the end, they are the ones who are going to be rich with the increase in their usage. So is the government working for the welfare of Indian citizens or is it another trap in which majority are falling? At the end what everyone is concerned about is the credibility of the Indian currency, which right now is at stake.

Author – Mansi Gupta || Blog Manager