A paperless E-COM'NOMICS

Enjoy a gastronomically delightful special chicken pirattu, chicken fry or beef fry at De Aliyans Thattukada at Kesavadasapuram in Thiruvananthapuram. Pick a few bucks from your digital wallet Paytm and wave a hearty goodbye to this tiny wayside eatery. It was very recently that an info board ‘Paytm Accepted Here’ was put up here. This sight, so far restricted to upscale urban shopping spaces and restaurants is an outcome of a bigger initiative taking place within the largest IT Hub in India, Technopark. Since demonetisation, the techie world is toiling hard to go cashless and lap up digital equivalents within the IT park with a ‘Cashless Technopark Campaign’. In the first few months of the brand new year, it’s likely that no transaction in Technopark would require paper money.

Initiated where tens of thousands of techies are employed, this move is led by Vivekananda Study Circle, an employee collective and Technopark. Praveen Kumar, secretary of Vivekananda Study Circle, going by the pace, anticipates the ‘cashless’ tomorrow barely a couple of weeks away in the IT park. “We are rigorously campaigning in the food counters. Some were already accepting digital payment options and Sodexo (food voucher) coupons. Even Sodexo is some sort of paper money. There have been talks with vendors to take paperless route and 70 percent have agreed to follow. Our celebrations and birthday parties are more or less in ‘cashless’ pattern when we opt for digital wallet and Paytm,” he says.

What was seen in the Kesavadasapuram thattukada is this. There’s a campaign ‘challenge accepted’ running parallel to the Technopark drive. Each ‘Cashless Technopark’ campaigner is bound to convince 10 persons or businesses in the city to choose the digi wallet option. Four people have completed the challenge and Praveen was able to ‘digitally’ convert seven business places including two traditional salons and a small-scale grocery shop next to his home. Those who realised the benefits of this initiative see the drive a blessing in disguise. Tigy Thankachan, techie cum co-owner of Danbauk Restaurant in Tejaswini building, has encountered credit risks in the past.

The wayside eatery with Paytm facility at Kesavadasapuram in Thiruvananthapuram.

“A couple of times, we received counterfeit notes from the customers. Unfortunately, that was identified only when we went to deposit in the bank. There was no replacement for the loss. So I support digi payment options. Post demonetisation, we were among the lucky few food counters in Technopark with a steady inflow of customers. In fact, the numbers only went up. Our restaurant had those payment options installed much earlier. In the initial days, almost 95 per cent of customers chose to swipe. Now the common feel is to keep the available paper money with themselves and opt for other channels,” explains Tigy.

Being the tech hotspot, there are companies here who were far ahead of times. Binu Jacob, CEO of Experion Technologies, narrates piloting their product FieldMax app among milk vendors of Milma Dairy products. He feels, no matter how big a technology is, to make things work, people’s mindset needs to be changed first. "As a company, we piloted it in “As a company, we piloted it in a  network connecting 40,000 milk vendors. FieldMax was a gateway through which they could easily place orders to the easily place orders to the centralised unit and transfer money to Milma’s account. Then rose a collective negative sentiment  among the retailers and they among the retailers and they backed out fearing inclusion into the tax net. The larger positive things were still forgotten. Take cues from African countries, not all are tech savvy there, but they know how to operate mobile payment system. It has been about a year our clients in Sweden exchanged plastic money for purchase. The ‘Cashless Technopark Campaign’ is laudable,” says Binu.

Here’s a low-down from Technopark CEO Hrishikesh Nair. “Paper cashless transaction has become a need of the hour. At first, vendors panicked about being slapped with additional service charge. A week after demonetisation, even minute transactions turned tougher without digital ways. Their business started getting affected. Digi wallet options are promoted for the Uber and Ola taxi services to the campus as well. We haven’t taken exact assessment, but there’s an overall improvement in accepting digital means,” says Hrishikesh.