The smell of currency paper blending with the smell of polished leather from the wallets that carry it is too hard to resist. The Indian women have the habit putting currency in all sorts of tins and containers giving them varied fragrances of spices and stuff. The touch and the smell of currency is quite an amusing thing.
However, in the past decade, India has seen tremendous rise in the issuance of Debit and Credit Cards making it unnecessary for us to carry a lot of cash. Three out of every five shops in the cities now accept cards for any shopping that you do. Even places like filling stations accept cards for as little as one litre of fuel. What’s more, Online Banking has also caught up fast enough. You can even pay all your utility bills online.
Though it is likely to take more time for this to spread into the semi urban and rural areas of the country, it is definitely a trend that cannot be taken lightly.
If we are in this age, then why not see what are the advantages of this:
- Huge reduction in cost of printing and distribution of currency.
- Reduced security problems both to institutions and individuals.
- Increases the scope of surveillance of account transactions thus giving improved access to law enforcing agencies and the government to cash flow metrics.
- Reduced use of hard cash may even reduce corruption to some extent.
Even if you take the world as a whole, it is still quite difficult to imagine a completely cashless system. A lot of transactions will always remain miniscule. Your bus fare when roaming within the city limits, your local metro weekly pass, your ten rupees worth vegetables for instance.
Not yet, you cannot probably think of referring to the end of currency on the wikipedia. Currency may outlive us for sure.
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