In general many poor people, even in cities,
do not have bank accounts and face lot of
issues when opening such accounts.
Sorry, but I absolutely can't stand when I see these kinds of arguments, because everyone reading this would believe this to be true apriori.Check this article from Feb 2015. Only 23k families were without a bank account. In a country of 250m families! In the last two years I think they opened 200m - or something like that - accounts. http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/nea... Agree about it not being very well managed, specially the ATM calibration issue. But I have no doubt, it would massively help in making digital payments mainstream. Already since 9 Nov, digital payments have overtaken credit/debit cards as stated in this article. Possibly it would even make India an even bigger market than China. It would also fight tax evasion - right now India borrows 60b$-70b$ every year - when coupled with tax reforms like GST which is set to kickoff next year. Btw, since last few years you need to supply an Tax Id whenever making transactions of more than 1k$ in cash, so this step fits in perfectly with that as well. There's some short term pain, but the medium/long term gains massively outweigh it. |