Kajal Chatterjee
This is in response to Swapnil Naik’s article titled “Cashless State — ground for cyber crime”(March 20).
It is nice to notice that when the slogan of “going cashless” has become the ultimate “proof” of one’s “modernity”; there still exist shining exceptions like Mr Naik who refuse to join the “nationalist” “modern” mainstream and dares to call spade the spade. The “historic” step of demonetisation has “gifted” us the baggage of “cashless society”!
The vast majority of the country is already languishing in this Indian society with virtually no cash leading to the vices of hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, child labour and human trafficking. It seems that to hide this supreme darkness, shame and scandal of cashlessness in real terms, the glitter and glamour of the technological jargon named “cashless society” has been adopted!
Though India is yet to become full-fledged cashless, yet we hear about so many cases where hard-earned money of poor and middle class have been siphoned off through electronic jugglery. The Savings Bank Account of one of my colleagues had been manipulated by unscrupulous parasites 6 months back and almost Rs 50000 had been withdrawn. But no organization is accepting the responsibility of the severe loss that has been suffered by my colleague. Right from the bank management to police to the State — all have washed their hands of the matter and my innocent colleague has been left to fend for himself!
Moreover there also exist innumerable barriers like software malfunction, link failure which have already taken a heavy toll on public life. Now if all financial transactions and records connected with our day to day life are forcefully digitised without any hardware or hardcopy as back-up, just imagine the havoc it would bring in the society if the over-hyped “modern” machines and software malfunction or get hacked! Are the “modern” messiahs of the nation aware of the fact that even the highly technologically-developed nations of the West are slowly returning to manual amenities like typewriters and physical files so that all records do not vanish if software get manipulated?
It is indeed a matter of utmost disgrace that in order to award benefits to the plastic card companies and impose a false sense of “modernity” through the instrument of technological jargon named “cashless”, an extremely dangerous scenario is being ushered in the Indian society.
