ORANGES FOR SALT AND SUGAR, HANDFULS OF COINS TO TRAVEL
I do not have the change to go to Azara (50km away) for a fiveday training. I cannot afford to miss this training, so I borrowed coins from villagers for the fare KUNJALATA RABHA, health worker (in white) › The traders told me that the three ~500 notes that I had were useless. The ~80 that I spent travelling from my village to the bazaar and back was a waste of money. So I decided to barter my produce for other essentials BABUL RABHA, farmer, displays the ~200 in change that he is left with
T here are two sides to living on the border. One, you get the best of both worlds – in the case of Babul Rabha, a market for his farm produce in Assam and Meghalaya. And two, you are neither here, nor there. The second is often dictated by external factors, like when the fire of an inter-tribe conflict further west along the Assam-Meghalaya border singed Jimirigaon in December 2011, or when cash suddenly “becomes a cow that does not give milk”.
A decade ago, when Jimirigaon, about 70 km west of Assam’s principal city Guwahati, was electrified, Babul had touched a live wire out of curiosity. It was a jotka (shock) milder than what hit him a day after PM Narendra Modi announced demonetisation of high-value banknotes.
It would have taken longer for Babul to get the news – mobile phone connectivity is
erratic – had it not been Wednesday, the weekly market day at Baganbazaar 14 km towards Guwahati. “The traders told me the three ~500 notes I took along to buy provisions are useless,” Babul, 40, said. So Babul decided to barter his farm produce for essentials. He loaded two sacks full of oranges and traded them for pulses, sugar and salt, the exchange rate fixed at ~300 for 80 oranges.
Babul and the 150-odd inhabitants of Jimirigaon have a bank account, but they prefer keeping money at home because of the distance they have to travel. The nearest nationalised bank is at Loharghat, which is 25 km away, and it caters to more than 20,000 people in some 30 villages around. Besides, Jimirigaon suffers the ailment of a village disputed by two states; its link to the world beyond is a 3 km dirt track that has not been metalled because of objection from Meghalaya.
Babul’s neighbour Matiram Rabha, a 41-year-old paddy farmer, was fortunate to have deposited ~12,000 – his earning in the past six months – in his account before the demonetisation bomb exploded. “The only grocery shop in the village has remained closed since that day, and I do not fancy using up whatever I have to buy a packet of tea or biscuits,” he said. Banks too are handing out coins to account holders, particularly to residents of remote villages such as Hangrum, 85 km from the nearest commercial centre in central Assam’s Dima Hasao district. “People are appreciating the coins as their needs are not much,” SBI official GS Das said.
The scenario is more grim across the tea-growing belts of eastern Assam where plantation workers have for 170 years been receiving weekly payment in cash. Now the planters are submitting cheques to the district administration and getting cash in return so that they can pay their workers. The ‘desperate measure for desperate times’ has helped avert labour unrest. But workers of a couple of estates where payment is credited to bank accounts are facing difficulties in withdrawing cash, following the shortage of currency of lower denominations.