With the midnight stroke of the 8th November, the nation saw a huge upheaval. A sense of eerie confusion ran among the nation as the Prime Minister of the nation Mr. Narendra Modi took the major step of devaluing the old Indian currency tenders of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 which accounted for around 85% our net money. On the day of announcement of this surprise test for the nation, Mr. Modi described this approach as a colossal surgical strike on the black money, but whether this method has proved to be a successful ambush on the black money “indeed”, is still a billion-dollar question.
The first and foremost pleasure that the government took in its this decision was the element of surprise, element of ingenious hard-work and economic planning as well as the element of courage in the decision. I truly believe that the element of courage on the part of government is worth praise and government has also got its share by being rhapsodised day and night by all the media houses, businessmen, celebrities and other eminent people.
But when I ponder over the other two things: the element of surprise and element of ingenious hard-work and economic planning; I believe the government need not be ascribed as much credit as it’s vehemently claiming.
Talking about the element of surprise, it was truly a startling thing for the nation to know about the black money, but it was not at all a surprising fact for the people who actually hold black money. Even the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) conceded to the claim that the new Rs. 2000 currency tender’s photo surfaced online even before two months of the official announcement of the nation. RBI, as well as the Union Finance Minister Mr Arun Jaitley, said that it “might” have happened because somebody in the currency chest and printing units “might” have taken any photograph of the notes and would have posted it online. The RBI and the Government of India (GoI) deems it as a petty issue and try to be evasive about the issue, but the big question here is whether the issue is that much small. It’s a very common fact that if you are having a lot of unaccounted money from any source, and you even get a whiff of any such announcement coming out online or on any other place, you would certainly make up arrangement in order to escape the coming danger and a lot of people have actually done that. Recent news shows that every week, one or two people are apprehended with millions of new currency notes. These people never stood up in ATM of bank lines but interesting they are having so much of currency notes just people they had already planned everything beforehand. The people who are having a huge amount of black money in the nation are also the most powerful and robust people of the nation having connection everywhere from government to banks. The loophole, which the RBI and the GoI considered as a minor and minuscule one, has actually led to 30%-40% failure of this approach.
According to senior economists of Bank Of Italy around $152-182 billion Indian currency has been stashed away abroad and this constitutes for more than 97% of our nation’s total black money (the rest 3% percent is present in our nation). First of all the measure taken up by the government is not going to take back even a single penny from those $182 billion dollars and hence talking about bringing the black money from overseas still continue to elude us. Talking about the black money present, on as estimate, the black money present in India is Rs. 2 Lakh crore. But is that money worth taking back through such procedures?
India made huge leaps of progress in economic terms due to its middle class. It’s a simple economic theory and actually, middle classes run the whole nation. When the middle classes earn, they spend a lot and this leader to the upliftment of the lower or impoverished classes. Let’s say you belong to the bourgeois society and you just get an incremental bonus in your salary. With that bonus, you decide to get you house painted. Now to get your house painted you employ two-three painters. These people constitute the economically backward classes of society. When these people get employed it leads to the empowerment of their society. After that, you would also go to buy paints etc. in order to get the work done. This would lead to upliftment of another member of your economic class i.e. the shopkeeper and also of big corporate houses who own the paint companies. So the middle-class forms a chain in every economic progress, but unfortunately this step broke the middle class and eventually the lower class is the one which is the most affected group today (from this decision). The whole middle class is today standing in ATM and bank lines. Neither the ATMs nor the banks have got the money. Some bank branches have even said that for their 4000-5000 customers they just get Rs. 15 lakhs for three days, which is truly nothing in front of such a large mob of people. The middle-class people, having no high connections in the government as well as banks, have to continuously stand in lines in order to get their Rs. 2,000 exchanged or to withdraw their money. This has led to complete ruptures of the market. The small scale industries have now vanished away. Big wholesale markets, small industries of clothing etc., the poor workers of these industries are now unemployed. There are so many people in India who work on daily wage basis as painters, carpenters, plumbers etc.. These people have got all their employment sources scrapped since today, people are finding it hard to even make both ends meet with the old currency then who would employ such people for works. Fruits and vegetable vendors have been crushed down completely because now since people are not having money in cash they are moving to big outlets and departmental stores in order to buy various commodities and those vendors who have no other source of remuneration are being forced to starve to death. According to estimates of The Indian Express, the nation has incurred a loss of Rs 1,28,000 crores till now. Do you still believe that we need to bring back those Rs. 2 lakh crores back by crushing our lower economic classes and battering our middle classes severely. The government says that it is not released money as per the calibrated releasing process but let me tell them, every day their calibrated release of money is leading to so many poor people sleeping without foods because these people didn’t have any bank accounts owing to their limited reach to banks etc. and every day they have to stand up in line in order to get a small amount of money exchanged and if, unfortunately, the bank gets drained out of money before the ending of the huge line, they have to go back empty-handed.
The government of India said that now they have upgraded features of the currency note and that terrorists sitting in Pakistan won’t be able to produce fake replicas of our notes for their wanton purposes. But these claims too drained down just after one week when fake Rs. 2000 currency notes were taken under siege which means the new currency notes are also equally vulnerable to counterfeiting. One more horrendous issue came up which portrayed some minor flaws in the printing of Rs. 500 notes where the dimensions of different parts of two Rs. 500 notes didn’t match up. RBI said it’s a small issue but former RBI Deputy Governor said that this issue is of zero tolerance. If you, yourself are making two different version of the same note, this would lead to confusion in public and through this fake Rs. 500 notes can be easily made to resurface in the whole economy and that too to a bigger extent.
The common people still believe that this is going to benefit us all, but the truth is that it has actually done more harm. We are losing out so much on our lower classes. More than 90 people died in the bank lines (which didn’t happen in Jio or film ticket lines), the great consumption theory in the nation has come to a grinding halt but still the government is blowing its trumpet of greatness after taking such a “surprising”, “ingenious”, “impetuous” and “desultory” step.
JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT
JAI MA BHARTI
No comments:
Post a Comment