Bidar: Satish Kumar Maruti Rao is a lorry driver on a forced vacation. His unpaid job for the last five days has been to travel 16 kilometres with a friend on his bike hoping to exchange old Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, or withdraw money from a bank. On three days, he came back empty-handed.
He lives in Umapur in Basava Kalyan, one of the several unbanked villages in Bidar district. The cash crunch has brought agriculture and business to a halt. Everyone is queueing up at banks. “There is a bus service to this village twice a day. Villagers are using bikes or auto rickshaws to reach banks,” he said.
There are around 213 banks in Bidar, the lowest for any district in the State. The district has around 170 primary agriculture credit cooperative societies in as many villages. A recent RBI note asked cooperative societies and banks not to accept old notes. As a result, the 17 lakh people in 900 habitations are forced to depend on the 213 banks.
“The banks are so overburdened that the staff are refusing to conduct routine transactions. They are not checking our passbooks to see if MNREGA wages have been deposited,” he said.
Satish Kumar is worried about the red gram crop in his village that needs an immediate insecticide spray.
Ratikant Nayak said that bank in his village, Kohinoor, serves people of five villages. “People come here even before the bank opens in the morning and wait for hours. Some times, they go back disappointed as the cash dries up fast,” he said.
The worst affected are self-help groups. Members visit banks to deposit cash, but can not do so in time. They can no longer deposit in the cooperative society in their village, he said. “Some SHG members told me that they have put off internal collection and recovery of loans for one or two months,” Mr Ratikant said.
S.N. Biradar of the unbanked Ningadahalli Khurd village near the Karnataka-Maharashtra border in Aurad taluk said the nearest bank branch is in Santhpur that is 12 km away. “So, I need to travel 24 km per day for a transaction,” he said. Earlier, he went to the bank once or twice a month. “Now if I don’t go there every day or thrice a week, I have no money to buy goods or to hire labourers,” he said.
