Bill Gates, Sachin Bansal, Umang Bedi Hail #CurrencyBan As A Masterstroke; Petrol Pumps Allowed To Dispense Cash!

#CurrencyBan has divided the country into two parts: On one side are those who are going ga-ga over the masterstroke by PM Modi, while on the other side are those are complaining about the mismanagement and long queues outside ATMs and bank branches.

And now, slowly but gradually, entrepreneurs and celebrities are joining the chorus, and expressing their opinions on the surgical strike against black money; and majority of them are actually supporting the action.

Bill Gates, who recently met PM Modi expressed his confidence on this move, and has said that the pain is worth it. When a man, whose personal net assets of $87.4 billion exceeds the total market capital of India’s largest company, says something on the prevailing economic conditions, then it ought to be heard.

On the mission of pushing cashless economy by PM Modi, he said, “India is pushing towards digitisation in a big way. The scale of the country means that once India gets there, the amount of digital innovation here will be greater than anywhere else in the world..”

Sachin Bansal, who is the co-founder of largest Indian ecommerce portal also expressed his optimism on the decision to ban Rs 500, Rs 1000 currency notes to combat black money. He said, “Firstly we should appreciate it….the idea behind it is very good, thought behind it is very good and the intent is very good. I’m hoping that this is not just one of thing and we get to see more often such things in the future.”

Meanwhile, Facebook India’s head Umang Bedi also supported the demonetization move and hailed it as one of the most crucial step ever taken to encourage a cashless economy. He said, “The demonetisation move is a great step forward towards removing many bottleneck operations including cash-on-delivery operations in Indian e-commerce market.”

He compared Alibaba’s single day sales volume of $20 billion with India’s Diwali sales (online) of only $4 billion, and said, “Personally in my opinion, I think in the long run it is (demonetization) going to drive digital adoption; drive demand; drive transparency; drive good governance, and drive commerce in a far larger fashion.”

Earlier, Infosys founder Narayan Murthy had also hailed the currency ban, and described that as a masterstroke.

Petrol Pumps And SBI PoS Terminals To Dispense Cash

Meanwhile, in order to ease the pressure on cash withdrawals, and to enable the common man to easily get hold of new currency notes, Govt. allowed petrol pumps to dispense cash from their own outlets.

Petrol pumps has been authorized to swipe debit cards and dispense upto Rs 2000 to each person via their Point of Sales terminals. This facility has been rolled out across 2500 outlets.

Besides, State Bank of India has announced that till the time ATMs start functioning normally, they will allow 2.3 lakh PoS terminals across India to dispense cash to SBI customers. There are around 3.1 lakh PoS terminals by SBI.

As per data available till now, SBI has dispensed more than 2.5 crore to 65,000 customers using their PoS terminals till now. Terminals located in semi-urban and rural locations can be used to withdraw Rs 2000 from these terminals, while Rs 1000 can be withdrawn from terminals located in urban locations.

Manju Agarwal who is the Deputy Managing Director (corporate strategy and new business) at SBI said, “All shops where PoS terminals have been installed (deployed by the bank) can dispense cash. There are 80,000 such terminals in rural semi-urban areas, 67,000 in urban areas and the remaining in metro cities,”

Sales of swipe machines used to accept payments via debit/credit cards has also witnessed sharp increase in sales ever since currency ban was announced last week.