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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

>>I do accept this fact. Is there better option?

Which fact do you not accept? Do you believe every person in India has a bank account? Every person has credit cards? Debit cards?

Do you believe purchasing chain from production to end consumers has infrastructure for electronic transactions? Or that there is a way to make the economy run when close to 80% of the money is taken out of circulation?

>>I am quite sure this decision was taken after discussing with lot of people who might have done PhDs in Economics and serving for Govt.

That doesn't mean much when the results on the ground say the opposite.

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Well, due to Prime Minister's Jan Dhan Yojana scheme, a lot more people have bank accounts and debit cards now. Over 220 million bank accounts were opened since 2014. People who have those accounts can actually make use of them now.

A lot more != All, let alone that. A lot more != Everybody-in-the-purchase-chain.

Now it was a known fact that 80% of the currency will go out of rotation. Now regardless of whether you have an account, 80% of the money people use to trade is gone!

Doesn't help if you have a account either. You don't have money to buy stuff.

Your point is if(and that is a big 'if' given 80% is gone!) you have money you could deposit it. Not spend it.

Well, I didn't actually say 'lot more == all'. I was just mentioning that PMJDY bank accounts and debit cards would ease things a bit for the people who have them, compared to the days when they had no bank accounts whatsoever (remember, PMJDY bank accounts are specially tailored for people with low income and/or unstructured income). Anyway, you don't need a bank account to exchange demonetized currency notes.

Biggest motivator for those accounts was not the privilege to have a bank account. But direct deposits in case the government wanted to pay the farmers and alike. That was the whole point in linking those to Aadhar too!

Now I'm not saying that this won't be possible. But its just these kind of changes can't be done with a throw of switch. You need to do a lot of incremental work before you can even think of this kind of big risky moves. Roll backs are hard, and in this case impossible(will lead to increase in inflation if done). Nor can you sit down quietly as there is no real way to put money back into circulation.

We all want to change the world. But we have to understand we need to change the world with consensus from people we want the changes to effect. The world is not in a hurry, and everything/everyone has their own priorities. You need to work with all that. Tech idealism is great, but at times something like this comes to remind us we know nothing about the daily complexities of other citizens.

Actually the previous time that this was shared on HN, the article clearly pointed out that less than 25% of the accounts are actually active.

Yes. Now, a lot of PMJDY bank accounts are seeing activity. This could be the case where people actually using their accounts, or could be the case where they are being misused to stash black money. In any case, GoI is looking into it[1].

[1] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation...

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