I got the news of banning of 500 and 1000 notes two days before I had to leave my city to Dalhousie, as a weekend getaway with a group of friends. Let me share some points to get a feel of what's the ground reality and how did we managed with little cash.
> Already had our bus tickets booked through a bus portal (RedBus).
> Already had our rooms booked online.
> So online payments took care of travel and accommodation.
> We didn't have much Rs 100 notes. I was lucky enough that I followed a practice of making sure I get Rs 100 notes whenever I take out money from ATM, using amounts like Rs 1900, Rs 2400 etc. And just before the news broke about of banning notes, I had taken out some money.
> So we had 10 hundred notes, that we thought were not enough but didn't have a choice. Tickets were booked so we had to leave for the weekend.
> The night before I went to a local super market and purchased hoard of eatables (buscuits / chips / cold drinks) by using plastic money. Since we didn't want to spend cash in travel.
> The day we reached Dalhousie, I went to a bank there, to get some Rs 500 exchanged. Needless to say there was a LONG queue. Thankfully it was a queue for depositing money in bank account. Queue for exchanging money was ... well... longer.
> Luckily, queue in female line was short, and we had a female friend who we used to get Rs 4000 exchanged, but even in that short queue it took one hour, since as we found out, counter for male and female were common. So the banker was exchanging money alternating between one male and one female at a time.
> The banker's procedure of depositing money was slow. Counting Rs 100 notes slowly and two times. There was no note-counting machines. But I was relieved that the bank were exchanging money in Rs 100 and Rs 10 notes rather than new Rs 500 note denominations.
> After a couple of hours ordeal, we had Rs 4000 in cash and in Rs 100 notes to ourselves which we were limited to spend since local market were not accepting money in old Rs 500/1k notes.
> Thankfully some big shops did accept Rs 500 notes but they were an exception.
> Very few people accepted PayTM, more like 1 in 20 shops.
> During last day of stay, we found it difficult to find a restaurant to eat which accepted old notes or even card. When we did find one, it was very expensive but we had less choice since we had booked train ticket for return and couldn't afford to become late in finding a place which was cheap as well as accepted cash.
In the end of journey, we found ourselves spending more time/efforts in managing cash than enjoying the travel, and made ourselves shop less due to lack of cash. Also a point to note is that almost no one we met, criticized the move of banning notes, except some shopkeepers who didn't accept plastic money and didn't know/believe in online money portal like PayTM.
Bonus point: Atleast 3 times we encountered shopkeepers who asked for our views on this move by Modi, rather than cribbing and complaining about it like most of city people do. I love how accepting, helping and friendly 'pahari' people are.
