"It's a complete lull and we do not know if opening the banks and ATMs will change things," a worried trader at the Lamington Road in south Mumbai, arguably the country's biggest market for electronic items and computer peripherals, said today.
A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's widely welcomed move to ban Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 bank notes, there was an eerie calm in the market, where hard currency rules settling trades worth crores daily.
"There is panic in the market because of the over- dependence on cash and lack of accountability where not every sale is reported," Mitesh Mody, secretary of the All-India Radio and Electronics Association, a traders' body, told PTI.
Mody said that half the transactions that happen in the market go unreported due the dominance of cash, which explains why getting an exact hold on the turnover is impossible.
He feared the impact of the move will be felt for long as consumers go slow on discretionary spending to concentrate on essential spending in the days of low-cash availability.
Mody said that in the face of a sustained dip in demand, inventory management and payments to suppliers -- most of whom are in China, Taiwan and South Korea -- will be the biggest concerns for the trade.
It was a similar, gloomy picture across the city's markets which sell expensive electronic goods, with a near-complete halt in purchases due to the ban on high value bank notes, even though some mobile sellers saw brisk business last night.
A trader in south Mumbai's Manish Market said, "There has been no sale since morning. Some customers are coming with Rs 500 and 1,000 notes and we are sending them back. Our whole business has been affected and we fear this impact to continue till next month."
The angst of the shopkeepers was very visible when some of them stopped mediamen from clicking pictures and threatened to delete memory cards.
The Irla market, known for electronic gadgets in the suburban Vile Parle area, saw good footfalls last night and a trader said there will be a shift to card-based payments from the cash side now.
Vinay, a store manager of Mobile Point NX, said his shop has decided to accept cash till the end of the day.
Sikandar, the manager of the famous mobile shop Alfa Stores, said it will take 10 days for the confusion to settle down and he also expects a shift to card-based transactions.
A senior official at the DB Marg Police Station, located right in the middle of the Lamington Road market, also said there is a huge drop in footfalls in the market and the traders are an anxious lot.
He, however, said things should return to normal once the banks reopen, probably oblivious to the fact that despite the crores that exchange hands under his jurisdiction every day, the market is decoupled from the formal financial system. Till now, at least.
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