Shri Narendra Modi
Prime Minister
Government of India
North Block
New Delhi August 15, 2017
Sub: Suggestion to the Prime Minister
Dear Sir,
I have a number of suggestions to make to you purely from an ordinary citizen’s perspective, but I thought in your busy schedule it would be difficult for you to spend too much time on a long communication.
Hence, I will be sending you just one suggestion every fortnight for your consideration and possible action.
My first suggestion in this series is :
Instruct all Government Departments, Banks and Credit Card Companies to issue Cheques or make digital payment or debit/credit amounts only to the nearest Rupee.
This means that no payment or debit should be made showing “paise” in it. Today, Bank interest is being debited or credited as Rs. 1567.63. Similar is the case with Credit Card Debits. Even where there is rounding off to the nearest Rupee, authorities are still printing “00” in paise column.
My suggestion is to drop paisa from all digital or “paper printing” transactions. This will result in huge savings in printing ink costs over a long period.
Let me illustrate this below :
A typical amount written in any cheque, passbook, Credit Card Statement, Railway ticket is Rs. XXXX.XX i.e. 7 characters have to be printed. If we do not write the “paise” figures, the printing will be Rs. XXXX. In this case the number of characters reduces to 4 as compared to 7 earlier i.e. 42.9 % reduction. You can see that, automatically, this means an 43 % reduction in printing ink consumption whenever money amounts are being printed. This amount will vary depending on the amount involved, that is if it is in lakhs or thousand:
- In case the amount being printed is below a thousand rupees i.e. Rs. XXX.XX then the revised printing of Rs. XXX will mean a printing of 3 characters instead of 6 i.e. a reduction of 50 %.
- In case the amount being printed is below a hundred rupees i.e. Rs. XX.XX then the revised printing of Rs. XX will mean a printing of 2 characters instead of 5 i.e. a reduction of 60 %.
If you extrapolate this amount over the entire country and in all transactions, public or private, this will mean huge savings for the country. Plus printing time will reduce proportionately and will be tangible and significant when Bank A/c statements are being printed for large customers or any money transaction statements are to be printed.
So in short there is a prevalence of paise in the printouts in all kinds of documents/statements – both when there is a value and even when it is zero. I went through a large variety of such examples simply to underline the point that this is happening on a huge scale and therefore if we suppress the printing of zeroes, the savings potential is huge.
Now how to calculate the nearest Rupee? We follow the Rule of Mathematics:
- Upto 49 paise, it will be the lower Rupee
- From 50 to 99 paise, it will be the higher rupee.
This may need to be legislated so that people do not file frivolous complaints or claims.
This will also make it more comfortable to fit statements in the international standard A4 Size paper instead of having to use Foolscap or even A3 size paper which will be another saving by itself. Most PSU banks use A3 size paper to give Bank Statements to customers while all MNC/ Private Sector Banks use A4 size paper which is a huge savings in paper cost.
Finally, did you know that in all Credit Card/POS machines you have to type .00 (DOT, ZERO, ZERO) for paise even when there are no paise in the bill or amount. This means 3 extra press of the Keys for no purpose at all. If you take into account the number of Credit Card and POS transactions that is happening every day in the country, you can well imagine that huge time that will be saved if “paise” are eliminated for all kinds of Billing/Money Statements.
Kind regard,
Hemendra K. Varma
