And yet more venting about the demonetization situation...

...after a talk this morning with a woman, Meena, who has been staying at our place, looking after mum, and who suddenly decided to leave after a fight with the day-attendant. Meena had only been with us for 19 days, so after calculating what we owed her based on the monthly wage, we got around to the matter of how this payment was to be made.

Hardly any cash at home. Of course. (I’m not getting into details of how much time I have spent in the past 3 weeks trying to withdraw money, and not succeeding, in a situation where two people I am responsible for are seriously ill and might well need to go to hospital on an emergency basis as the Delhi weather and pollution levels get worse for the ailing and vulnerable. Including an 88-year-old who knows nothing of debit/credit cards, is accustomed to having at least 70-80K in her house in cash for contingencies, and is getting psychologically very affected by this whole business of being unable to withdraw her own money from the bank account she has had for decades. Jana Dhana Manaa, as Tagore never wrote.)

Meanwhile Meena doesn’t have a bank account. She showed up at our place today still looking worried but also hopeful, explaining how someone else she worked for had told her about the concept of the “Self”-addressed cheque. What this person presumably told her was that *anyone* could take such a cheque to the bank and withdraw money with it, but through miscommunication and lack of basic understanding, this in Meena’s mind became: “With a ‘Self’ cheque, you can go to *any* bank and withdraw money.”

I could narrate the gist of our conversation in dialogue form here, but that wouldn’t adequately convey the almost panicked look on her face when I tried explaining the rudiments of the banking process. I ran her through it step by step, used what I thought was pure logic: if I had an account in Kotak Mahindra and wrote her a cheque from my cheque-book, why would another bank honour it and give her cash on my behalf? It would have to be Kotak (not that there is a hope in hell these days of getting anything out of them). But at the end she still looked uncertain and then sullen, as if she was becoming convinced we wanted to cheat her by making things more complicated than necessary.

So here’s a woman, living and working in the national capital, reasonably competent at what she does, reduced to a stuttering wreck when discussing basic concepts such as deposits and withdrawals. She is one among millions. Meanwhile, jackasses everywhere – in the government, on Facebook, on WhatsApp, NRIs who know nothing about the India that exists outside their pretty pink bubbles – continue speaking as if everyone in the country has access to 3G and smart-phones, and knows what Paytm is and how to use it. And singing hosannas to a PM whose story is so inspiring because he started off as a chai-wallah – never mind that he gives the impression of being thoroughly out of touch with most ground-level realities.

P.S. on a somewhat related note, with my Airtel wi-fi switching on and off for most of yesterday, I had a late-night talk with a customer-care guy who explained that a cable had broken down and parts of the NCR had had connectivity problems for a few hours.
But of course, the whole country, down to the remotest village, is using Paytm, plastic and net banking. No problem at all.

[Earlier posts about the currency crisis here and here]