HOW BHARAT COPES: By dipping into the store of stoicism
GASPARA: Ashia Khatun’s tears won’t hold now.
“Please don't say that. I have to arrange the challisha (funeral rites) of my father. I need all the money in my account. Please be kind," she pleads with the operator of SCI’s customer service point (CSP) at Gaspara even as he parks his scooter.
Ashia's hamlet, Dalimbari, is 130 km from Guwahati, and 30 km from the nearest bank — an autorickshaw ride and a 5 km walk away. CSP operator Hiren Medhi has just returned from the lone SBI branch at Raha in Assam’s Nagaon district with Rs 50,000 in cash to dispense at the Gaspara CSP. The CSP is on the other side of the Kopili river from Ashia’s hamlet. For Ashia, crossing the river to draw money – her own money – for her father’s challisha has become a daily affair since November 8.
An elderly gentleman in the queue requests the operator to see if he could help her, but he’s silenced by the others. Ashia's father, Abdul Gafur, died of old age last month, and the challisha is due Monday. The ritual entails an expenditure of Rs 50,000, but all that she has in hand is a few hundred rupees.
This is the cashless economy of Gaspara.
Ashia's hamlet is on the Meghalaya border. She has a savings account with the SBI branch at Raha. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, she went there, waking up before dawn and hoping to be at the front of the queue. She walked 5 km and took an hour-long autorickshaw ride to the river. A country boat ferried her to the other side. Then she walked about a kilometre to catch another autorickshaw, which dropped her near the SBI branch. Hundreds of others had had the same idea as her and there was already a long queue when she reached. She returned empty-handed on both days. She tried the five ATMs in the town with the same result.
The SBI CSP at Gaspara caters to a dozen villages on the Kopili's south bank and has around 4,000 customers, most of them daily wage earners. Post-demonetisation, they have been hit hard.
Unlike Ashia, Brajabasi Das, 48, and his wife Suchitra Das are all smiles as they were third time lucky and managed to draw Rs 1,000. Das had pedaled to Gaspara from his village Baburaati on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the CSP window shut before they got to it. Today they made it. “This money will help me run my family for 10 days. We will eat less. Earlier, we would spend it in five days,” chuckles Brajabasi, a farm hand who earns Rs 250 a day. But he hasn’t had work since November 12. “The farmers have no cash,” he says.
It’s not just the villages. Business in Raha is down by around 50 per cent. Eatery owner Jayanta Nath says he used to make Rs. 9,000 daily. It’s down to Rs 4,000 now.
Handcart puller Bindeswar Yadav’s earnings are down to Rs 50 per day, compared to the Rs 300 he would earn earlier. “People have stopped going anywhere. This is going to make us poorer, at least for now,” he says.