Jury is out on demonetisation meeting its goal: survey
1 min read . Updated: 07 Nov 2022, 08:07 PM IST
Premium- People are still selling and buying products like hardware, paints and many other household and office paraphernalia and also delivering services without proper receipts, the LocalCircles survey said
MUMBAI : Six years after demonetization of high value currency to check the growth of a parallel economy, the verdict is still not clear whether this step has indeed delivered its goal, community social media platform LocalCircles said on Monday.
It conducted a survey to better understand use of cash, receiving over 32,000 responses from citizens in 342 districts and said that anecdotal evidence reveals that people are still paying or accepting black money in real estate transactions.
“People are still selling and buying products like hardware, paints and many other household and office paraphernalia and also delivering services without proper receipts," it said, adding that at the same time, it is true that in the last six years more people have adopted the digital payment mode.
The survey asked respondents that when they or their family bought a property in the last seven years, on an average what percentage of the value had to be paid in cash.
“The responses revealed that 8% of the 11,499 respondents to the query had paid over 50% in cash. Of the remaining, a whopping 35% refused to divulge; 21% claimed they had paid no cash during the transaction; 15% had paid between 30-50% of the transaction in cash; 13% had paid 10-30% cash and the remaining 8% had paid up to 10% of the value in cash," it said.
The company said that the situation may look to have improved compared to its survey in November 2021 when 70% of the respondents had admitted to paying cash as part of the transaction for property acquired in the previous seven years.
“One encouraging sign is that as against 16% who admitted to having paid over half of the amount in cash in 2021, the new survey reveals that the percentage of such cases has dropped to 8% in the new survey. However, the 35% not divulging must also be taken into account and it is safe to assume that many of these individuals did pay some cash in the transactions they conducted but they are just not comfortable disclosing the same, it said.
