Delhi government’s curious attempt and create a digital financial system in this small, sleepy Najafgarh village with negative net connectivity has come to a cropper. Rajkot, 65, runs a small grocery shop dwelling room of her residence at Gorakhpur village in Najafgarh. The glass counter is filled with toffee packing containers, whilst strings of tea packets, shampoo, and gutkha sachets hang on the walls. She is sitting on a charpoy with the children in the shop. Rajkot’s is one of the stores that gives card bills. As we suggest buying bloodless beverages and paying with a credit card, she pulls out a smartly packed swipe gadget from the drawer.
“I do not understand how to use it, so I will call my husband,” she says and rushes into the residence. Soon her husband, Surat Singh Solanki, enters the room, but he too expresses his incapacity to apply the device. “The village has negative internet connectivity, and the machine no longer paintings maximum of the time,” he says. Ironically, on February 7, Surakhpur changed into declared Delhi’s first completely digital fee-enabled village by the government. The Delhi authorities organized an Aadhar camp and invited over 20 banks to the village to open Aadhar-seeded bank accounts; motion pictures were performed on a large LED display screen at the chapel to train villagers on e-wallets, cellular banking, BHIM App, and lots of bank-specific applications.
Two grocers in the village, including Surat Singh, obtained the swipe gadget and the training to handle it. Singh, but does not keep in mind that the remaining users of the machine. “Most villagers buy bread, butter, and soaps from me and like to pay in coins,” says Surat Singh, sitting on the counter. Four months on, the authorities’ try to enforce the digital financial system has come to a cropper in the village with poor internet connectivity, low cellular telephone penetration, and basic services consisting of shipping and water.
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Poor internet connectivity in the absence of a mobile tower is a common refrain in this ‘completely digital payment-enabled village’. Pranjal Solanki, 14, says that his relatives offered a laptop last year, but needed to gift it to a cousin in a neighboring village. “The dongle might not receive any signal. We realized that buying it was a mistake,” he says. No surprise, then many inside the village ask why the issue of net connectivity was not addressed earlier than their village changed into selected for the digital initiative. Nagender Solanki, a student, says that villagers had been switching from one mobile phone operator to another for better connectivity, but to no avail. “Forget net banking. It’s miles tough to apply the net in the village even for emails,” he says.
One of the goals of selling the virtual economic system in this village of 113 families changed to empower women. Still, many ladies, including Pushpa Solanki, do not have a financial institution account yet. “My husband has an account, and the new debit card arrived recently. But it’s miles of no use. The village does not have a financial institution or ATM,” she rues.
