DIGITAL VILLAGE IN AP-HAMLET

It may be a rarity, but a once unbanked village in Andhra Pradesh’s Prakasam district has gone cashless, with all of its 2,209 residents adopting bank accounts and mobile phones.All families in the sleepy Kakuturivaripalem, 30 km from here, use bank accounts, RuPay cards and phones to transact and make payments to milk suppliers and Kirana stores equipped with electronic Point of Sale (e-POS) machines.

The hamlet has been declared a ‘digital transactions-enabled model village’ by the Prakasam district administration and Syndicate Bank’s Andhra Pragathi Grameena Bank.The road to cashless life began with the Centre’s Regional Rural Bank drive under the Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJY). The A.P. Grameena Bank’s business correspondent V. Venkat Rao is available at the rachabanda (village square) all day to help the villagers get used to the digital way.The number of such transactions doubled to Rs. 50,000 a day since demonetisation.Unlike in other parts of the district, there are no queues for cash at Kakuturivaripalem, says G. Ramesh Babu, a young farmer.

The cash crunch hampered sowing for the rabi crop. In response, the villagers made funds transfers to accounts of workers and suppliers of fertilizers and pesticides, adds Mr. Babu, who cultivates tobacco and Bengal gram on his five-acre plot.He helps fellow villagers transfer cash through mobile banking: initially, nominal amounts to friends and relatives, which helped develop self-confidence.This is the second village in Prakasam and reportedly the third in Andhra Pradesh after K. Pallepallem, and Dwarapaudi (Vizianagaram district), adopted by Civil Aviation Minister P. Ashok Gajapathi Raju, for cashless banking.

Prof. John Kurakar