Daily wage labourers being paid in banned currency notes

Daily wage labourers at Sri Krupa market at Malakpet are being paid banned notes of Rs 500 for their day’s work by the Agricultural Marketing Committee.
A separate queue for women outside SBH Ibrahimpatnam branch in Hyderabad on Tuesday | Vinay Madapu
A separate queue for women outside SBH Ibrahimpatnam branch in Hyderabad on Tuesday | Vinay Madapu

HYDERABAD: Daily wage labourers at Sri Krupa market at Malakpet are being paid banned notes of Rs 500 for their day’s work by the Agricultural Marketing Committee (AMC).

The AMC stepped into the auctioning process at the market, in order to avoid the prices of onions going up in the city. This was after the onion dealers association called a ten-day strike which comes to a close on Friday.

Irrigation minister T Harish Rao had directed the AMC officials to supply the market with onions. While this has come into effect, the AMC officials at Malakpet have been paying the daily wage labourers  with the banned notes for their loading and unloading work. AMC officials at higher ups were surprised and unaware of this practice.

Ramulu is a daily wage labourer working at the Sri Krupa market for 18 years. He neither owns a bank account nor an account under the Jan Dan Yojana. “I earn Rs 500 a day. Yesterday also they paid me Rs 500. What option do I have? I need the money,” he says. The only person who owns a bank account in his family is his wife, but she does not own an ATM card.

“I go to SBI and get the notes exchanged. For the past few days due to the strike we had no work, so the money we get now is important,” said Mallayah, another daily wage labourer who has been working with the market for 20 years.

“We can’t tell them that we will not accept old notes as we will have to come back here for work later, so we take the banned notes,” he added.

L Srinivas, the supervisor at the Sri Krupa AMC, is helpless. “The state government is accepting old notes so we accept them but there are no Rs 100 notes for us to pay the workers with. We don’t have a choice here,” says Srinivas. “Most of the workers don’t have bank accounts and for those who have accounts, we can’t do real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) transfers as the workers want their wages today itself,” he added.

“People are not accepting old notes, maybe they (AMC officials at the market) are giving delayed payments because of their relationship. We are collecting market fee as per the instructions of the central government and accepting old notes,” said Lakshmi, additional director, AMC.

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