Demonetisation and the facade of digitisation

Two years after the lunacy of demonetisation, the government is still brazenly defending that monstrous policy action. It says demonetisation helped in digitisation and formalisation of the economy. Even if those were useful goals, was the payoff worth 100-odd lives?

Of course, formalisation and digitisation weren’t supposedly the original objectives. Those buzzwords started being thrown around only when it became obvious that most of the cancelled notes would return. Moreover, if the government had actually been serious about digitisation, it would have spent the past two years putting in place an ecosystem to promote and support that digitisation.

Instead, we