A year after announcement, demonetisation has apparently gone into oblivion. The people stood in long queues in front of banks to deposit the specified notes of ₹500 and ₹1,000 denomination The people deposited as much as ₹72,000 crore worth of scrapped notes. But, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is yet to despatch about ₹15,600 crore to Andhra Pradesh.
The ATMs ran out of cash on most of the days in November last. The situation did not improve till January 2017. The State government initiated a slew of initiatives to tide over the crisis. The question that remains unanswered now is: how many such e-initiatives still have public acceptance and are in usage.
Aadhaar-enabled payment system is one such initiative. It brought laurels to Babu A, who served as Krishna District collector then. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu showered praises on him for his idea, at the Collector’s conference. The government even encouraged shopkeepers and business establishments to switch over the Aadhaar-enabled payment systems.
The State government even provided mobile phones to poor, who did not own the phones, to encourage digital transactions. It also launched ‘AP ePurse’, an app for digital transactions. Mr. Naidu headed panel on digital payments constituted by the Union government.
ATMs
Demonetisation has brought startling fact to the fore. Only 5,900 of the 8,036 ATMs across the State as on November 21 were active. In fact, there is no correlation in the data of the Reserve Bank and the SLBC on ATMs. There are 8,309 ATMs as on June 30 as per the SLBC. The RBI, however, says there are 9,199, including 1,611 private banks’ ATMs. Similarly, the SLBC says there were 7143 ATMs as on March 31, 2015. The RBI says there were 8,438 ATMs, including 1,493 of private banks.
Only 16 per cent of the Jan Dhan accounts opened in Andhra Pradesh were in active use in the State. This startling fact came to light a year ago. There are 45,41,918 Jan Dhan accounts in rural areas, while 35,46,935 accounts were opened in urban areas taking the total to 80,88,853 accounts as on December 7, 2016.
