Street-smart hawkers go cashless, unzip e-wallets

MUMBAI: The cash crisis has made several street vendors in the city to switch to e-wallets to avoid a loss of customers.

Ram Singh, a paanwalla at King's Circle has prominently displayed his phone number outside his kiosk, Calcutta and Banarasi Paan's, and the message that he is accepting payments via a digital wallet.

Singh said that initially he didn't bother much with demonetization as he seldom dealt with big currency notes like Rs 500, not to speak of Rs 1,000. “But I didn't realize that the situation at banks will be chaotic, resulting in people not having enough cash. We also had to stay shut for two days as we didn't have change to give customers. That's when my son got an e-wallet account,“ he said. E-wallets are

cashless

methods of payment. Examples include Paytm, FreeCharge, and MobiKwik.

Like Singh, pavement book sellers along MG Road in Fort and several shopkeepers at

Crawford Market

have taken to e-wallets. “We have started transactions on such apps as business started getting affected,“ said a vendor from Friends Book Shop outside Oriental Building on MG Road.

A sandwich seller near Dadar TT too has made the digital switch. “Because of the cash crisis, a few customers requested me to accept payment via an e-wallet. So, I got one of those apps. My customers are mostly students and young professionals,“ said Sandesh, who runs his stall on the footpath that leads towards Ruia College.

“Our app download has gone up by 300% in the last couple of days,“ said Sonia Dhawan, DGM (marketing), Paytm.