Cashless Travel: Get Smart On Your Journey Across India

Don’t Let Demonetisation’s Teething Troubles Force You to Hit the Brakes on Your Journeying. Where There’s a Will...there’s Always a way to Travel. 
 

- Supriya Sehgal

A packed-to-the-brim truck that hadn’t moved for almost 20 minutes at the tollgate had everyone fuming behind it. We were particularly mad, being wedged between two mammoth, overloaded trucks in a relatively diminutive Indigo. Suddenly, my driver got some space and did a Vin Diesel to squirm out of the queue and join another. This one was moving slightly faster. Traffic clogging at tolls is a city thing, so we couldn’t understand why we were stalled in the middle of nowhere in Chhattisgarh.

Clearly, both the driver and I had missed the nationwide memo on the midnight of November 8, when 500- and 1,000-rupee notes were made defunct overnight. Naturally, the tolls were not accepting these notes and the drivers did not want to part with smaller change. I, too, got stripped of my last 100-rupee note and was left with 80 rupees in my wallet and this bewildering news to deal with. There were seven more days to go in the state.

Demonetisation has become a household word since. Almost 85 percent of the cash went out of circulation overnight, leaving the country in a confused state. The Prime Minister subsequently promised that the situation would come under control in the next 50 days—round about the time that we bid adieu to 2016. A staggering move like this is bound to reap interesting results, but no one could really grapple with predictions of how it would pan out.