This Article is From Nov 12, 2016

For Farmers In UP Hinterland, A Desperate Wait For New Notes To Arrive

Without cash, farmers in Uttar Pradesh are left without a way to buy seeds and fertiliser.

Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh: At a government-run warehouse at Barabanki, 30 km from Uttar Pradesh's capital Lucknow, 23-year-old Lav Kush is one of the few farmers who has turned up with enough usable currency for two sacks of fertiliser.

This fertiliser is critical for the potato crop that he's just sowed on his two acre-field. He'll need more fertiliser soon, but Lav Kush is already out of cash.

The government's decision to withdraw 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation and replace them with new ones has hit farmers in far-flung areas hard.

For a warehouse that deals mostly in cash, sales have plummeted in the last three days. Earlier, 5,000 sacks of fertiliser were sold on a single day here. On Thursday, just 74 sacks were sold.
 

The warehouse that sold 5,000 sacks of fertiliser earlier is sold as few as 74 on Thursday.

"150 to 200 farmers come and stand in line in the morning but they have large notes and we cannot accept them," said S N Tripathi, the manager of the IFFCO warehouse.

A few kilometres away, at the Minapur village, 27-year-old farmer Dheeraj Kumar who's about to plant mustard in his one acre-field, said cash in hand right now is critical.

Mr Kumar has purchased the seeds for his field but needs about Rs 5,000 in cash for fertiliser. But with his 500 rupee notes yet to be exchanged at the bank, he has no way to pay for them.

"At the bank today, they gave 100 tokens and asked the rest to go away. If we delay fertilisers by say 10 days, there is a bug that will destroy the mustard crop," said Mr Kumar.

At the Jaidpur block's Gramin Bank of Aryavrat, a major bank in the area for farmers, people like Mohd Taj, a farmer, waited all day to deposit their unusable notes but to no avail. The bank has no new notes and has already exhausted its stock of 100 rupee notes.

"I think if new currency doesn't come in soon, how will be given them money in return of what these people are depositing?" said S K Kuril, senior manager at the bank.
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