Chandragupta wrote:This forum has become an echo chamber. Any criticism or questions are drowned out and only praise is allowed. Talk about living in ivory towers.
I just came back from the bank hoping to withdraw some money but they had no cash. Everybody in the queue was angry and abusing the banks and the PM.
How so ? You are extrapolating a personal anecdote as a broad fact. RBI, from it's 'ivory tower' announced that As of Dec 7, Rs.11.85 lakh crore were deposited. On Nov 27 that figure was 8.11 lakh crore, and a week before that, 5.xx lakh crore. Total cash outstanding was around Rs.14.xx lakh crore. Simultaneously, the latest data posted above shows that Rs.4.xx lakh crore in additional cash was disbursed since Nov 10 . Over 80% of the work is done.
What does this tell you ? Those lines, despite being long,
are effective. Everything is working out way ahead of the 50 day deadline. Worthless old cash has been deposited, and new cash has been disbursed, across the country. The banking system has scaled up its effort 10x or 100x above typical volumes.
Chandragupta wrote:It seems like all black money has been laundered. And it is going to be a tough mountain to climb for the Government to try and get BM in the net.
This is the kind of criticism you want to make ? "Seems like" ? Please do criticize, but please show some rigor. People aren't responding to such criticism with 'seems like you are wrong. I think so". Hard data is being quoted.
It's absolutely true that there are long lines and frayed tempers. But that's not criticism against this. That is a mathematical fact . There are 460 million working age people, approx 400 million bank accounts, approz 100,000 bank branches, and 50 days. Assume a certain rate of processing and the math gives you a picture of what the lines will be like. Now plug in how many deposits have been made, and ask yourself if the rate of processing (80% of cash deposited/exchanged in 4 weeks out of total 7 weeks planned) is good or bad ?
When you deal with numbers like in India, lines will be long. They're long at cinemas, at Kumbh Melas and now at bank branches. The amount of surge traffic is impossible to add capacity for at reasonable cost within our current means, e.g. 'Govt should have built 10x more bank branches before DeMo'...
IMHO "forum has become an echo chamber" is essentially a response to anecdotal observations receiving data as response. Largescale loss of confidence should manifest in the form of public rioting, destruction of bank premises etc. Where are these stories ? After all, an antagonist press would gleefully show pictures of bank buildings burning down and people lynching bank officials. Rigor is necesssary. Criticism without rigor should not expect to go unchallenged. When I google 'India bank lines' I see lots of pics of long lines. All orderly and serpentine. No burning buildings, blood, tear gas or anything. The very fact that 50/100-deep lines are orderly is astounding - by popular belief they're 'supposed to' all crowded the counter, after all...
Another claim is 'should have planned this better'. But that's a very superficial argument. Pretty much no one who makes that argument has any idea *how* it can be planned better. It is a rhetorical construct. When queried the answer is typically 'that's GoI's or RBIs job to figure out'. Again, this is not meaningful criticism, and often just demonstrates that the person egostically thinks it could have been done better, even if he/she has no idea, or no interest in explaining how, in a manner others cannot criticize in response. Accepting such criticism means we agree not to bother about understanding what was wrong, how it went wrong, and what measures could have fixed it. Rather, a conclusion has been established and no leading facts are required. Is that fair ?
Yet another claim is that "Government should have figured everything out beforehand". But that reflects a profound lack of experience at the issues associated with leading enormous new initiatives . DeMo is several orders of magnitude larger in scale and scope than anything of the sort that any other nation has ever attempted in the history of mankind. The Chief of Staff of the Prussian Army during Bismarck's time, Helmuth von Moltke, once famously said "no prior plan survives initial contact with the enemy". The best plan isn't one that figures out everything beforehand as a grand strategy, because they can't. It's one that has a basic strategic structure, but which can be adapted to immediate tactical requirements effectively. GoI is doing this, by and large. The incoming data bears this out.