These days, if one gets to see roadside vendors having the facilities of digital payments for their customers, then, the credit goes to the Government which has been stressing, working on going digital concerning banking transactions. Over time, there has been a lot of improvement made in terms of banking by the Government, particularly in shifting to digital transactions while achieving considerably in that direction. The country which is now a growing economy and is competing with the largest economies of the world needs to change in the banking sphere, which it did and has almost started to reap the benefits of the same.
It all started post-demonetization which was announced by the Prime Minister, all of a sudden. The move did shock everyone, rather, those who had large funds away from the system—not paying taxes which they owed to the system—were affecting the economy more while the demonetization was aiming at addressing that side of the money flow in the system too. If seen keenly, it was this money that was then used for so many illegal activities, because this money was not a part of the system and was used to affect the entire setup as a whole, without a trace.
With demonetization what held its roots were the digital transactions; no doubt, it is getting stronger day by day, but to state that a large chunk of the population is now relying on digital transactions, getting used to it, won’t be an exaggeration. People are getting into the landscape where money won’t have a physical presence, but just a number credited or debited from countless accounts. This shift has not only made the lives of the people easy, but has saved a lot of resources, not only for the general public, but the banks as well as the Government, evident by people hardly going to banks to withdraw cash, or deposit the same—it is all now confined to a touch of a finger.
The demonetization has been criticized a lot since the day it was carried out; however, the changes that it has brought about in the deepest layers of the Indian financial system were never talked about, discussed, or brought to the fore. It would be in place to state that without demonetization, the Indian society, which is far too complex, would not have been able to witness the transition to the digital sphere of money, rather, something that was done in a jiffy—though it caused some short term issues—would have taken decades. The need of the hour is now to remove all the remaining bottlenecks within the system and take measures for ensuring a 100% shift to the digital world to have a transparent, ready-mode system available aimed to further boost the country’s economic growth.