Cashless Will Be King as Digitisation Makes Inroads

The government no longer has to put its hands in everybody’s pockets to monitor where the money goes after it leaves the mint. Digital money will give the State control over everyone’s wallet, warns Harcharan Bains.

 

 

- Harcharan Bains

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing an unsuspecting and a ‘reluctant’ India through monetary asceticism which could lead the country to be-coming a ‘cashless paradise’ long spoken of in our spiritual and even fiscal scriptures. When the Prime Minister delivered his banking bomb last month, few would have thought that this was actually a harkback to India’s ancient spiritual and economic traditions in which money is referred to as maya and its character is described as extremely fickle and treacherous.

Under the new dispensation, even Dharamraj will have to learn computers to digitise our hell-worthiness. Our religions always complained that the nature of maya is fickle. The Modi masterstroke has tried to make it less fickle, more reliable and verifiable. Cyber will replace the spiritual — and both are equally intangible if not unreal.

However, Modi was inspired more perhaps by hardcore fiscal ground realities than by the philosophical unrealities of religion. Cashless society is seemingly a modern and Western fetish. Terms such as “plastic money’ — or, at a more advanced stage — “digital money” are just sophisticated covers to hide another driving force which is central to the cashless fetish: centralised control through the use of invisible technologies. So technology, which was supposed to democratise power through universalisation of information will actually create new dictators sitting on top of all information even on our private lives.