New Delhi: Making and breaking queues is a human game Indians love to play. Ubiquitous ration queues thanks to ‘Ship to Mouth’ became a passe long ago but today queues due to ‘ATM to Mouth’ is the new game India is learning to play.
Currency is the life blood of any nation and if you take away 86 per cent of the life of person, sooner than later the person is likely to pass out. Just the other day, a neighbour was buying vegetables using a handful of loose coins that had dollars thrown in for good measure. ‘Ek Naya paisa’ got an all new meaning after that fateful 8 PM announcement.
The serpentine queues are lining up to take modern India back to the future it seems! To me, a small-town country boy, this brings back memories of when India was living ‘ship to mouth’... queues at ration shops extended till infinity and stocks vanished faster than they were ever replenished. Today, I go back four decades ago to a time when food shortages were plenty, grains like wheat were being imported in millions of tonnes from the USA under the ‘PL 480’ or food for peace scheme and since they landed on seaside ports, the phrase ‘ship to mouth’ became a household name.
I recall my mother tightly holding my little finger and both of us queueing up outside a dilapidated ration shop to buy a few kilograms of red coloured wheat and a handful of sugar. More often than not a handwritten placard read ‘out of stock’ very akin to the scribbles on paper that today reads ‘no cash’. Ration shops and queues were a part of the daily lexicon in the bad old days of the 20th century when the left of centre socialistic Congress party-led governments had brute majority.
Today after decades, another majority government, albeit right of centre rules and is considered rather friendly tocapitalism and trade, yet queues are back in vogue. But even in this so-called resurgent digital India of the 21st century where ‘Make in India’ is prevailing slogan the country is literally ‘making queues’ and this time it seems it is for ‘ATM to mouth’! Patience is running thin and a hungry India may soon become an angry India. Food rationing was rampant, households usually converged at ‘ration shops’ and not at Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs). Back then money may not have been plenty but at least it was there but food grains were in short supply.
Today the new generation has learnt to be patient in queues in ‘food courts’ but now loose change is in severe short supply and credit card machines are jammed as the servers are unable to handle the new digital rush. Banks have become the new ration shops.
A so-called surgical strike on black money by the Modi government whose script is now unfortunately going horribly wrong in its implementation. On the ground it is causing too much disruption for the vast majority of honest Indians. Cash rationing was not a gift that people expected when Modi promised ‘achhe din’.
(The writer is Science Correspondent of PTI)
