Quietly returns the cash

“We are yet to recover from it (demonetisation),” says Sanjay Kumar, proprietor of Gangotri, one of the oldest shops in the 143-year-old New Market in Kolkata. Seated amidst stacks of dry fruits, papads and choorans , he appears wan and tired, as he slowly sips a cup of tea. “It took us months to stabilise after demonetisation; we had no customers as no one wanted to spend money.” Kumar had installed a digital cash machine, but even then customers preferred to spend only on essentials. “It was a nightmarish four to five months before we had anything close to a normal flow of people in the shop. Hamara to diwala nikal gaya (We were nearly wiped out). Sales are sluggish even now. Thanks to demonetisation, online sales have increased, spelling doom for small people like us.”

Across the shop, at the iconic Jewish bakery Nahoum’s, there’s now a card swipe machine. No one is quite clear when it was installed — “sometime late last year or early this year” is all they remember. But the servers insist customers still prefer to pay in cash, except when buying in bulk. “Our items cost very little anyway.” They say the machine was due for a while because many customers, especially those coming from outside Kolkata, always asked if they could pay by card. “It was for them that we’d ordered the machine.”

At most stores in the market, vendors who had installed the machines have stopped using them. Some say they have a machine, but not in working condition.

There’s a crowd outside J Johnsons, a tiny kiosk-like store with an enviable stock of olive oil, pesto, pizza and pasta seasonings, cheeses, maize, cooking chocolate, spaghetti and more. Everyone is shouting out their orders to the three men inside who are trying their best to speed up the billing. This is a popular pit stop for professional and home chefs wanting to source ingredients in bulk at wholesale prices. Business here has got back to some kind of stability only in the last six months. “Our customers were hit hard — especially the ones from restaurants. They weren’t doing well. No one was eating out.” The men say there was a spike in digital transactions during demonetisation, not any more. Most customers prefer to pay in cash.

Cash seems to have made a quiet comeback in most people’s lives. “How can we do household expenses without cash? It is impossible,” says Richa Agarwal, who is here for her weekly groceries. “My neighbourhood grocery store from where I buy my essentials deals in cash. Fresh fruit and vegetables vendors don’t accept anything but cash. So what demonetisation are people talking about?” Agarwal says the family faced a few problems the first six months after the move, but once the ATMs started functioning smoothly, it was back to normal. “I still can’t understand the reason for the move. I am not buying anything much online, my kids maybe, that is a different generation. Lekin sabzi toh bazaar se hi khareedna padega, na (Vegetables have to be bought only from the market, isn’t it)?”

Many shopkeepers say sales continue to be depressed. “Consumers are not indulging. They buy only what they need, they rarely do indulge buys any more,” says Kumar. “This (demonetisation) was not done properly — the method was all wrong. Most of us here live on daily earnings. So the concept of getting a machine and waiting for money to transfer to an account doesn’t work for us,” he adds.

Some grocery sellers say they had installed the e-payment service Paytm for a while, but have reverted to cash now. Sameer Mondal, a fruit stall owner, had introduced a Paytm facility in December last year. Daily Paytm transactions were high from December to mid-January. But it started declining soon after, and now it’s a trickle, if at all. Mondal prefers cash, as he doesn’t want to bear the fee merchants have to pay while transferring money from an e-wallet to his bank account. He says demonetisation had brought a sharp slump in business, with his daily earnings cut by half until March. “I am doing better now, but we just managed to scrape by. Some of us were not so lucky. I know of people whose families were deeply impacted. No one bothers about poor people. Yeh kalyug nahin toh aur kya hai (This is kalyug, what else)?”

Old shops such as SC Pyne & Co (selling handcrafted Bengal embroidery home furnishings) remained largely unaffected by demonetisation. “We have a slow and steady business. And we are subsidised by many. We didn’t feel the impact, but I hear all those (real estate) promoters along Rajarhat were in a slump,” S Pyne, one of the owners, cackles.

Anuradha Sengupta is a Kolkata-based freelance journalist

COMMENT NOW