Telangana Not Ready To Go Cashless Yet: Congress

Former Minister and Congress leader Marri Shashidhar Reddy today told the Centre through the Media that implementing a cashless economy would have repercussions of its own.

Speaking to the media at Gandhi Bhavan on Tuesday, the former Minister claimed that sensing the nation's mood, Modi changed the narrative from war on black money to cashless economy.

Reddy claimed that a cashless economy could be easily manipulated during natural disasters, cyber threats, online fraud and smart phones misuse, and would be impacted by negative interest rates, and if banks including the SBI and ICICI collapsed, the Economy would collapse as well. He claimed that the even educated people, most often, avoided net banking and other modes of online transaction for safety purposes.

He quoted former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and said that the note ban had turned out to be a colossal failure of management with people having limited or no access to money in their bank accounts, even if temporarily. He alleged that such treatment amounted to legalised plunder.

Quoting the ex-Prime Minister's prediction of a decline of a minimum of 2% in India's GDP rate, Reddy alleged that Modi had not given any thought to the fact that Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes accounted for 86% of the total currency and hence had no clue about how adversely the move would impact the middle-class and the poor.

Like many in India, he, too, incorrectly thought that black money was bundles of bank notes to be exchanged by influential people for favours, Reddy quipped.

Neither the Prime Minister's address on November 8 in Mann Ki Baat nor the PIB press release after that had any mention of the cashless economy, he claimed.

Reddy raised doubts on whether Telangana or the rest of India were really ready to go entirely cashless, given its huge rural population.