Demonitization Woes (4) - Women's Savings now in men's hands .

 (via Sunny Narang)

Women's Savings now in men's hands .

I spoke with a technical foreman in an industrial area in North India yesterday . He told me , that a painter he hires has not been coming for past few days . And the reason is , that his wife had saved Rs.1 lac over many years from her monthly budget in cash and she threatened to commit suicide if he did not deposit the cash in a bank .

Millions of women in India , the below report says 80% do not have a bank account . They save from their drunk husbands , or hard-working ones cash from monthly and daily earnings to build a nest egg for emergency , festivals, children education , weddings .

This single act of Demonetisation has trashed all those savings , and if money is coming in the Jan Dhan accounts and other not so active bank and post office accounts , it is lots of this women's saved capital , now "transparent" in Men's accounts . 

I really hope someone does a Gender-Study affects of Demonetisation . 

The penetration of debit and credit cards in India remains low despite recent efforts by the government to get more to bank. As of 2013, only about 400 million Indians had a bank account. According to a report late last year, 80 percent of India’s female population don’t have a bank account.

India is uniquely different from many other countries, though. Even many who do have a bank account in the country don't necessarily use plastic cards to do transactions. A whopping 88 percent of all the debit card usage in India are to withdraw money from automatic teller machines. 

Transactions at point of sale (PoS) terminals account for only 12% of volume and 6% of value of total transactions, according to a paper released by Concept Paper on Card Acceptance Infrastructure. 

One of the issues that is preventing India from going digital is lack of smartphones. Though India is the fastest as well as the second largest smartphone market, there are only about 300 million smartphone users in India. This prevents the vast majority of people from getting their hands on the terminal that they need to make use of mobile wallets, for instance.

In places such as the United States, where only 8 percent people are without a bank account, it may appear that it's only a last mile problem before all Americans are able to pay for everything digitally, but at places like India, and even several other Asian markets that have been increasingly trying to go cashless, we are simply not there yet. 

In Indonesia, for instance, only about 20 percent of the population had a bank account in 2013, with debit card penetration standing at 11 percent, and just 3.2 percent of the population possessing a credit card. Though epayments solutions are slowly gaining ground in many nations in the Middle-Eastern region, cash is still the king there. About 85 to 90 percent of retail transactions in MEA region involves cash and cheques. The UAE, which is one of the leading countries in MEA region in terms of electronic payment technologies adoption, still sees the vast majority of its transactions done with paper bills.

Cash remains the king in many countries, and it will be years if not decades before much of the world can part ways with the paper bills. 

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Sunny	Nov 25 (2 days ago)