As the India government overhauls the nation’s currency, the country’s 119 million farmers are struggling to find the cash they need to pay workers and cover costs, says NPR. The country is essentially cash-based, and farmers especially rely on having money in hand, rather than in the bank or on credit.
The government has taken 500 and 1,000 rupee notes out of circulation, but the new notes meant to replace them aren’t sufficiently available yet.
“The shortage of hard currency could not have come at a worse time. In the Punjab (the nation’s breadbasket), farmers had barely harvested the summer crop when they began planting the winter one which fell simultaneously with a government currency crackdown. But the seeds, the machinery, the fertilizers, pesticides, the farmhands – all of it is paid in cash,” says NPR.
Most Indian farmers operate on plots of 10 acres or less and earn an average of $3,000 a year. Even if they did have a bank account, which most don’t, they wouldn’t necessarily be better off. The Indian government has placed rural cooperative banks — the popular choice for those farmers who bank — on lockdown during the currency reforms.
“My money,” Amrinder Singh Punia, a Punjabi farmer, told NPR, “is lying in the bank, and the problem is, I can’t take it out.”