WHAT’S ON

Diwali

Pink Diwali

Sat 28 Oct (7.00pm onwards)

Saheli Club Sydney presents Diwali event at Hemani Mehmi Indian Restaurant 268 George St, Liverpool. Details email team@saheliclubsydney.com.au

Diwali party

Fri 27 Oct (6:30pm - 12.00 midnight) SendPyar organises a Bollywood theme Diwali party at Belhaven Manor Function Centre, 82 Station Street Wentworthville.

Details Sangita 0403 056 490 / 0401 279 386

Nepalese Deepavali

Sun 29 Oct (11.00am - 8.00pm) Rockdale Bicentennial Park, West Botany St, Rockdale

Deepavali at church

Sun 5 Nov (6.00pm-7.00pm) St

Mary’s Church, corner of Miller and Ridge Streets, North Sydney will celebrate the Festival of Light, India’s biggest festival. Ceremonies will include blowing of the conch shell, lighting of the ceremonial lamp, special Indian music, including Christian hymns and prayers in Indian languages such as Hindi and Gujarati and a Sanskrit mantra and devotional and festive Indian dances.

Details 02 8918 4101

Seniors

Dementia forum

Fri 27 Oct (5.30pm - 7.30pm) The Consulate General of India and the Dementia Support Group for Indian Australians Inc in collaboration with the Federation of Indian Associations of NSW (FIAN) present a dementia forum at the Consulate, Level 2, 265 Castlereagh Street, Sydney.

Details Anju Kalra 0478 130 464

Seniors Forum

Sat 4 Nov (1.30pm - 4.00pm) AASHA Australia Foundation Ltd presents a panel discussion on ageing and seniors’ rights. Pennant Hills

Community Centre, cnr Yarrara Rd and Ramsey St, Pennant Hills. Details Bijinder Duggal 0412 786 569

Films

Film For Thought

The South Asia Study Group at the University of Sydney presents its film series ‘Films for Thought’, at the New Law Annexe Seminar Room 342. This film series includes a set of films over the course of Semester 2, 2017 focusing on gender issues in different countries across the South Asian region and the South Asian diaspora in Australia.

Thur 26 Oct (5:30 pm – 8.00 pm)

Gulabi Gang

Thur 16 Nov (5:30 pm – 8.00 pm)

Udita

Thur 30 Nov (5:30 pm – 8.00 pm)

A Thin Wall

Details Nishtha Sharma 0490 373 031

Stage

Kathak

Sat 28 Oct Swastik Institute of Dance presents Kathak exponent Pandit Rajendra Gangani in the show Kathak Darpan. Riverside Theatre in Parramatta. Details 0402 551 841

Poetry

Sat 28 Oct MKS Films presents an evening of poetry Kavi Durbar Mushaira, at C3 Conference Hall, 108 Silverwater Road Sydney. Details Shah 0420 212 969

Theatre Fest

Thur 9 and Fri 10 Nov Nautanki

Theatre presents its 2nd South Asian Festival at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta. Details Sunny Singh 0449 616 227

Yugpurush

Fri 24 Nov, Sun 26 Nov and Tue 28 Nov Shrimad Rajchandra

Mission presents stage production Yugpurush, based on the spiritual life of Mahatma Gandhi. Sydney Baha’i Centre, 107 Derby Street, Silverwater. Details sydney@ shrimadrajchandramission.org

Rahul Deshpande: Classical vocal

Sun 5 Nov (5:00pm - 11:00pm)

Haridayesh Arts Sydney presents classical vocalist Rahul Deshpande live in concert at Parramatta RSL Auditorium, Cnr of O’Connell St & Macquarie St, Parramatta Details Vasanti 0416 057 032

FUNDRAISER

ATSA’s Saaya

Sun 29 Oct (3.30pm - 6.30pm)

Australian Telangana State Association presents its annual Saaya program, an evening of Bollywood songs at The Performing Arts Centre, Pacific Hills Christian School, 9-15 Quarry Rd, Dural. The two worthy charities picked as the beneficiaries of the event this year are NAAM foundation which works for the welfare of the farmers in India and Sarvodaya Youth Organisation in Telangana which helps provide homes for orphans.

Details 0402 335 054

BAPS Walkathon

Sun 12 Nov (10.00am - 12.30pm)

Sydney BAPS Mandir will hold its annual fundraising walkathon at the Sydney international Regatta centre, Penrith Lakes. The two worthy charities picked as the beneficiaries of the event this year are Nepean Hospital and the Chappell Foundation. Meet at Gate A, Old Castlereagh Rd, Castlereagh.

Details Pradeepbhai Jobanputra 0420 779 988

LECTURE

Ambedkar lecture by Michael Kirby

Wed 8 Nov (12 noon - 2.00pm)

Western Sydney University presents the Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG, presenting a talk entitled ‘Law Reform, Constitutional Reform and the Inspiring Example of Dr BR Ambedkar’. Moot Court, Building EO, Parramatta Campus, WSU. Cnr James Ruse Drive & Victoria Road, Rydalmere. Details k.manning@ westernsydney.edu.au

National Unity Day

Tue 31 Oct (5.00pm - 6.00pm)

The Consulate General of India, Sydney cordially invites you for Rashtriya Ekta Diwas (National Unity Day) on the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, at the Indian Cultural Centre, Level 2, 265 Castlereagh Street, Sydney. Details Vishwajit 02 9223 2702.

Spiritual

Chinmaya Mission

30 Oct – 4 Nov (7.30pm - 9.00pm) Swami Shrikarananda presents free public talks in English entitled Know the knower and the known, at Chinmaya Sannidhi 38 Carrington Rd, Castle Hill.

Details Mahal 0411 899 554.

Sri Andal Sydney

Fri 3 Nov to Sun 5 Nov Sri Andal Sydney presents spiritual discourses (upanyasam) in Tamil by Sri U Ve Aravindalochanan Swami. Venues Wentworthville, Wattlegrove, Baulkham Hills, Westmead.

Details Mohan 0412 472806

Community

Bangladesh Festival Australia

2017

Sat 28 Oct (3.00pm - 10.00pm)

Live entertainment, mixed stalls. Paul Keating Park, The Mall, Bankstown. Details www.bdfestival.com.au

The Sydney Hills Curry Festival Sun 5 Nov (2:00pm - 9:00pm)

International curry stalls, Bollywood performances, musical performances, traditional clothing stalls, kids’ rides, face painting, jewellery stalls. Castle Hill Showgrounds, Showground Rd, Castle Hill. Details 1300 338 368.

To list your event email: media@indianlink.com.au

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Online transactions on the rise, but cash is still king

Aparajita Gupta

Almost a year down the line, is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream of making India a cash-less or less-cash country becoming a reality?

Industry stakeholders feel that though the note-ban drive by the government gave the necessary impetus to citizens to start adopting online payment platforms, a lot needs to be done by both the government and the industry to make it a success.

The adoption rate of online platforms was high during the demonetisation period, but it plateaued out as soon as cash became available in the system.

When the Modi government banned high denomination notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes on 8 November last year, removing an overwhelming amount of cash from the economy, people had to willy-nilly fall back on plastic or online transactions.

“The fact that 86 per cent of the cash available in the system was sucked out overnight gave an immediate boost to online/mobile payment platforms. There was a push-up factor,” Vishwas Patel, cochair, Payments Council of India (PCI) and founder and CEO of CC Avenues, told IANS.

But once cash was back in circulation, those who earlier dealt mostly in cash went back to doing so, he said.

The PCI was formed under the aegis of Internet and Mobile Association of India in 2013 to cater to the needs of the digital payment industry.

He said during November, December 2016 and January 2017, online transactions were at their peak. In October 2016, debit card transactions stood at Rs 21,941 crore and those of credit cards at Rs 29,942 crore. Post-demonetisation, in December 2016, debit card transactions jumped to Rs 58,000 crore and those of credit card were at Rs 31,150 crore.

However, in August 2017, 10 months after the note ban, debit and credit card transaction stood at Rs 36,000 crore each, having come down substantially from the heights they achieved, but not falling back to the pre-demonetisation lows.

Patel said that after the cash flow in the system eased, small kirana shops stopped transacting through online payment channels, primarily because they did not want to take a tax number or a Goods and Services Tax number. “They do not have the wherewithal to pay taxes,” he said, adding that the “government needs to incentivise merchants, otherwise small and medium enterprises are going to go back to cash mode.”

Patel said security and trust in payment systems was something all stakeholders need to work on together. “As an industry body, we are preparing a National Negative Database of consumers and merchants so that we can reduce fraud and build trust in the eyes of consumers,” he added.

The database details would be circulated amongst payment gateway service providers, banks and card companies. “We are also working on a trust certificate that can be displayed by all merchants on their websites,” Patel added.

Vineet Singh, Chief Business Officer at Mobikwik, a payment app, said demonetisation had become a force multiplier. “It has pushed India a decade ahead towards the agenda of adopting online payment platforms. Naturally, things cooled down a bit post-demonetisation,” Singh told IANS.

Mobikwik had 3-3.5 crore users in the pre-demonetisation days and a year after note ban it has 6.5 crore. The company also witnessed a sharp rise in transactions from one million to three million within a year.

“Online payment companies in the last one year have increased their base significantly. They are experiencing healthy month-on-month growth and the adoption of online payment platforms was across all age groups,” Singh said, adding that “now everybody takes online payment seriously, which will provide a secular road towards a cash-less society.”

Vivek Belgavi, Leader, Fintech at PricewaterhouseCoopers, too said that, after cash returned to the system, people started transacting more in notes, but there was an uptick in digital transactions.

“Digital transactions have grown. But the key thing is that a lot of stepping stones for future adoption have been laid down -- like the BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) app by the government. Demonetisation was the shock that forced people to move to online channels,” he said.

Belgavi said the government should give more importance to low-cost infrastructure like availability of point-of-sales machines.

“Industry should offer citizens the whole ecosystem of digital transactions. They should be offered an experience that is better than cash transactions,” he added.

Dewang Neralla, MD and CEO, Atom Technologies, told IANS their online payment processing volumes had grown three times since demonetisation.

“By March 2017, our transactions had doubled and with almost 11 months gone by we still see a healthy growth of around 20 per cent on a month-on-month basis. Today we process payments of about Rs 6,800 crore per month across more than 100,000 merchants. We expect this figure to grow at least three times in the next three years.”

Online transactions are bound to grow over a period of time, but in a country which overwhelmingly ran on cash, it may be difficult to do a quick digitisation.

Demonetisation: Economy shaken, GDP hurt, trust in govt undermined Biswajit Choudhury

While the immediate impact of demonetisation was seen in the long queues outside ATMs and felt through acute cash shortage, its upcoming anniversary is an appropriate vantage point to assess the less visible and generalised effect on the economy of what was easily the most disruptive measure postIndependence.

The difficulty in making a cost-benefit analysis is that the move was not purely economic, given the fact that the currency issuer Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had no role in the decision, as testified by former Governor Raghuram Rajan.

So demonetisation comes across more as a measure of political economy with the declared objective of curbing black money and countering counterfeiting and terror finance, and which appeared to have paid political dividend to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Uttar Pradesh elections this year.

Starting with the official figures, at the end of May, the Central Statistics Office announced that GDP during the fourth quarter, ending March this year, fell sharply to 6.1 per cent from seven per cent in the previous quarter, while growth for the year as a whole was also expected to decline correspondingly. India’s GDP during the past fiscal grew at 7.1 per cent, at a rate lower than the 8 per cent achieved in 2015-16.

In terms of gross value added (GVA), which excludes taxes but includes subsidies, the growth came in even lower at 5.6 percent over the GVA for 2015-16.

Chief Statistician T.C.A. Anant sought to downplay the impact of the note ban, saying he “would caution against reading a single number that comes out after an event as being reflective of consequences of the event”. At the time of releasing the previous quarter’s GDP, he had said that this was based on figures on industrial production and only on the advance filings of corporates.

The numbers, therefore, had not factored in the informal economy, which accounts for an estimated 45-50 per cent of output in the Indian economy and employs around 85 per cent of the country’s workforce. More importantly, this sector transacts entirely in cash and was the hardest hit by demonetisation, which withdrew 86 per cent of currency from circulation.

Former Chief Statistician Pronab Sen had said in March that once the informal sector numbers came in, the growth rate could go below 6.5 per cent, which turned out to be close to the actual figure.

At the same time, both the RBI and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lowered India’s growth estimates for 201617 by up to 1 percent, citing the impact of demonetisation.

Sotheby’s staff in London inspect a large silver tribal ritual mask of Nandi with origins in 18th century southern India, on 20 October. It went under the hammer on 25 October. Photo: AP

This was not too far from former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s prediction that the economy would be hit by around two per cent because of the note ban.

Rating agency ICRA said in a note earlier this year that “since the early estimates of quarterly GVA rely heavily on available data from the formal sector, which is expected to have weathered the note ban better than the informal sector, the third quarter (October-December) projected GVA growth of 6.6 per cent may not fully capture the impact of the note ban”.

In October, the IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook that India’s economic growth for 2017 and 2018 will be slower than earlier projections. The report cited “lingering impact” of demonetisation and the goods and services tax (GST) for the expected slowdown during the current and the next year. The IMF projected India to grow at 6.7 per cent in 2017 and 7.4 per cent in 2018, which are 0.5 and 0.3 percentage points less than the projections earlier this year, respectively.

The World Bank too forecast that India’s GDP may slow from 8.6 per cent in 2015 to 7.0 per cent in 2017 because of disruptions by demonetisation and the GST.

Former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, who, on being asked by Modi for his informal opinion, had said the costs of such a measure would outweigh any longterm benefits, while there were less costly alternatives to achieve the stated goals of demonetisation.

“On the short-term costs of such a measure, monetary economists would say that you’d see an immediate impact on activity. People who used currency, things would shut down for them... there would be an unrecoverable effect on economic activity,” Rajan said here at the launch of his book “I Do What I Do”.

Citing the cost analysis by metrics of demonetisation done by JP Morgan, Rajan said the GDP took a hit of around 1.5 per cent, which translates to a sum of Rs 200,000 crore.

“On the benefit side you have Rs 10,000 crore coming in, but you need a lot more taxes than that to really benefit,” he said.

Coming back to the beginning, this is what Nobel winning economist Amartya Sen had to say of demonetisation: “It is a despotic action that has struck at the root of the economy based on trust. It undermines notes, it undermines bank accounts, it undermines the entire economy of trust. That is the essence in which it is despotic.”

With demonetisation also designed to enlarge the tax base, an ex-IRS official’s perspective on Modi’s likely motive is provided by former Director of Revenue Intelligence B.V. Kumar, who writes in his book, “Underground Economy”: “One reason could be that Modi has completed half his term and not a single initiative during his term has shown results which can be termed as ‘spectacular’ and ‘vote spinners’.”

Demonetisation, after one year, does not look as rosy as it was painted out to be by the image spinners in the government.

Demonetisation: Modi government shoots itself in the foot

Amulya Ganguli

Much of the efforts of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders to explain away the current economic slowdown as the result of “technical” glitches, as party president Amit Shah tried to do, or as teething troubles of demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST), are likely to be seen as instances of whistling in the dark to keep up the party’s spirits ahead of a series of state assembly elections.

Even International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde’s certificate about the “solid track” of the Indian economy refers to the future rather than to the disturbing present.

For the time being, therefore, the BJP’s problems relate to both the absence of jobs and the economic stagnation, which indicate that the employment situation will not look up any time soon.

For bringing the party to this sad juncture after its rousing victory three years ago, the BJP has itself to blame if only because the political and electoral scene has been bereft of any challengers since 2014. It can be said to be guilty, therefore, of scoring self-goals.

If the BJP’s political dominance is under threat, the reason is that the party has shot itself in the foot by both the controversial measures - demonetisation and GST.

Interestingly, neither of the two was seen as life-threatening at the time when they came into force. Instead, they were thought to be “life-changing”, to quote the supposedly autonomous University Grants Commission’s (UGC) adulatory phrase about Narendra Modi’s speeches.

Demonetisation, for instance, was hailed by the hoi polloi as a dramatic step against the parallel economy. At one stroke, it was said to have wiped out all the accumulated wealth which the holders of black money had kept under their mattresses.

The argument that currency notes constituted a minuscule percentage of hidden treasures was ignored. The subsequent disclosure by the Reserve Bank that 99 per cent of the scrapped notes had been returned underlined the correctness of this assessment.

But even as account-holders stood for hours in queues outside banks to deposit their suddenly useless notes and get new ones - 100 of them dying during the ordeal - as many as 1.5 million jobs were lost in the informal sector all over the country.

While the human cost of this crippling blow to the small and medium businesses will never be fully known, it has brought the BJP to its present pass. If any party can be said to have wilfully undermined its own prospects, it is the BJP.

The party enacted the same folly with the GST. Initially, it was thought to be a reform whose time had come. The fact that it was first proposed by the Manmohan Singh government and was then taken up by the BJP despite its earlier opposition suggested that its good points were undeniable.

After all, who doesn’t like the idea of one country, one tax? Like the uniform civil code, GST was expected to bring in an element of simplicity and evenness in the tax structure.

But just as the civil code has been hanging fire because of the difficulties of dispensing with age-old adherence to personal laws, the complexities of the GST have stumped small and medium businesses which are unused to hiring the expensive services of chartered accountants to prepare their balance sheets.

The woes of demonetisation and GST have, therefore, proved to be a bonanza for the BJP’s opponents. They are now able to show up the party as incompetent. This perception is particularly true of demonetisation. What was expected by the BJP to be a political masterstroke, which enabled it to claim that it has made the black money hoarders run for cover, has proved to be a fiasco of the first order.

Little wonder the BJP quickly changed its line on demonetisation from being an act against the parallel economy to being a pro-digitalisation initiative. “Note bandi” was to make the paper legal tender disappear altogether in favour of plastic money, but the process is still under way.

If the Modi government did not want to believe that cash was the life blood of the economy, especially at the rural and semiurban areas, it was presumably because the decision of sucking out 85 per cent of the notes from the system was taken by only a few.

Hubris was behind this “bold” decision which was to prove to be fatal. Modi was riding high towards the end of 2016 with the opposition nowhere in sight and the chants of “Modi, Modi” during his foreign tours ringing in his ears.

His party, too, was completely under his thumb. If there was anyone in it who thought that demonetisation was risky, he or she did not have the guts to say it. If a noted economist like Manmohan Singh said that the move was a monumental misjudgment, he was dismissed as a carping critic who was saying what he did because of being in the opposition.

Arguably, if Raghuram Rajan was not hounded out of the Reserve Bank by the saffron maverick Subramanian Swamy, he might have given sage advice.

Rajan says in his autobiography that he told the government in February last year - demonetisation took place nine months later - that its “short-term economic costs” would outweigh the long-term benefits.

This is exactly what has happened. While the immediate economic consequences of demonetisation have been little short of disastrous, there is no certainty when its favourable impact will be felt.

Meanwhile, as the government grapples, ineffectually, with various problemsunemployment, farmers’ distress, and the antics of saffron vigilantes - the Congress is showing signs of revival.

Ians

The first anniversary of the Modi Government’s demonetisation comes up on 8 Nov. Visit our website www. indianlink.com.au for more analysis on the effect of this disruptive measure on the Indian economy.