[Reader-list] On Demonetization and Its Impact on Bangalore’s Waste pickers and Recyclers

[Kabir Khan]

On Demonetization and Its Impact on Bangalore’s Waste pickers and Recyclers
<https://wastenarratives.com/2016/11/25/on-demonetization-and-its-impact-on-bangalores-waste-pickers-and-recyclers/>

*Shreyas Shreenath*

*Important as are the standard measures of a community…its measure of value
is by far the most important of them all. The measures of weight,
extension, or volume enter only into particular transactions…but the
measure of value is all pervading…the conservation of the contractual basis
of society then becomes tantamount to the conservation of an invariable
measure of value.*

*—*B.R. Ambedkar,* The Problem of the Rupee: Its Origin and Its Solution *
(1923)

   1. *Three cases* *

After much haggling with godown operators, Jalil managed to get the money
that was owned to him on the morning of November 8th. It was just after the
Dasara and Deepavali season, when payments are often delayed by people who
need large sums of money to cover festival expenses. Now that he had
finally retrieved the money, all in fresh 500 and 1000 rupee notes, he
visited the local shopkeeper at 9:00pm to get smaller denominations to
cover household expenses, as well as pay the wages he owed to the waste
pickers working at his waste collection center.

“The shopkeeper folded his hands,” Jalil remarked, “and after I asked him
what the matter was, he told me to look at the TV screen. 500 and 1000
notes banned.” The shopkeeper was of course referring to the Prime
Minister’s decision to surreptitiously demonetize Indian rupee notes of the
highest denominations, a move that sought to target undeclared cash stocks
and which rendered 86% of India’s money supply invalid overnight.

Jalil was suddenly left without any change, and for the next few days, his
business was interrupted as he spent his time standing in bank lines. “I
felt as if I was standing in line with someone else’s money,” he remarked.
He could only exchange 2000 rupees, and that too once. Scrap dealers like
Jalil often do not have bank accounts. This is because the majority of
their transactions occur frequently, in cash, and with other parties who
form the most financially excluded segments of urban India.

Demand drafts, checks, cards, unified payment interfaces, and digital
wallets—modes of payment that India’s elite and middle classes are
ferociously deploying until demonetization woes tide over—have little
relevance in Bangalore’s recycling trade, a vocation that, with much irony,
cleans up after urban bouts of conspicuous consumption. Here, hard cash,
held not by faceless institutions but by people one knows and deals with
regularly, still remains the most reliable way to conduct business. In
their daily operations, recyclers are not only faced with changing prices,
types, and qualities of plastic, paper, cloth, and metal, but also changing
circumstances.

To illustrate the kind of contingencies that scrap dealers are confronted
with daily, let us take the example of how a scrap dealer would approach a
sack of HDPE (high-density polyethylene) plastic. Not only can the asking
price for the sack suddenly fluctuate, but it may also contain mixed waste
and impurities, be seized by officials asking for a bribe during transport,
or stored in a location that becomes a target of arson or eviction. Or
perhaps the waste picker who sorted through it may suddenly fall ill and
require emergency funds. When managing all of these matters, cash remains
both the most concrete and the most liquid mode of payment in a recycler’s
arsenal—concrete because it is easily retrievable and seldom fails as a
store of value, liquid because of its near universal application. Continued
here...
<https://wastenarratives.com/2016/11/25/on-demonetization-and-its-impact-on-bangalores-waste-pickers-and-recyclers/>

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Regards

कबीर/کبیر

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