Cashless Society: A New Reality
- Aishwarya Harsule
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
On a Sunday morning, Aarav got up from his deep sleep and went straight to his piggy bank, his beloved treasure chest. He plans to get the latest Hot Wheels with the saved-up money. But today seemed different; he couldn’t find the piggy bank, confused he rushed to his father. The screen was buzzing with Payment app notifications—fees paid to Aarav’s school, salaries sent to their driver and house help, and even electricity bills cleared in seconds.
“Papa, where is my piggy bank?”, he asked. “Its right here!”, father responded. “What about the money?”, asked Aarav.
“We don’t need physical money, we have digital money now”, his father responded.
His father started talking about how switching to digital money eliminates the need for physical printing, reducing deforestation, energy consumption and waste”. Aarav grinned – maybe Earth would thank them for saving trees by ditching paper rupees.
Later that morning, Aarav and his father went to the local bazar. His father bought vegetables, but instead of paying cash, he scanned QR codes attached to each vegetable bag. Just like in big malls, every item got tallied digitally, and the vendor generated a bill with GST automatically added. Aarav realized something important: the vegetable vendor now had to pay GST to the government on every UPI transaction, which meant the government was tracking digital trade better than before.
After the tiring day, Aarav came home with his father, as his father was about to reach out to the refrigerator, the fridge said,
“Milk was delivered today, please make the payment to the vendor” Aarav was stunned, his smart fridge which could only cool vegetables, was now extra-smart, keeping a record of pending payments and helping his father set up repeat payments called Auto Pay.
He saw that fridge interface said – “Now plugged with UPI 3.0”.
At last Aarav, knew he was in the future of payments now! He knew that the technology around his was evolving. As he was wrapping these thoughts around his head, he heard another synthetic voice coming out of his dad’s watch saying
“You are bike is now ready to be picked up from the servicing. Please pay Rs. 1000, say “ Make Payment ” to continue with the payment right away”
His dad made the payment with his watch. But what happened to UPI/CC PIN? He went to ask his dad,
“How did you make that payment?, What about your PIN?”
His dad said, “We do have voice activated payments now, we no longer need to be stuck to our phones to make the payment on go.”
That’s when Aarav started to think about how robbers could rob us now digitally, except that they would be called hackers! With a concerned look, Aarav asked his father – “What about malpractices and frauds?”
He father smiled back and said, “You remember seeing more of Google safety ads in theater? That’s because phishing scams are increasing, fake links, imposter’s finding ways to get your UPI PIN, even some hackers are using Deepfake to trap innocent audiences. Some hackers, practice SIM swapping, where criminals hack mobile phone and reset payment apps.
Sometimes, hackers paste fake QR to divert payments from original account so you should always check that the account is verified while paying and the merchant or vendors name is exact. That’s why payment systems need extra layers of security—like AI fraud detection, biometric locks, transaction alerts, and limits for suspicious transfers. India’s regulators, RBI/NPCI and government are continuously updating UPI security with device biometric verification such as audio, retina scan, fingerprinting and clubbing them with behavior patterns for multi-factor authentication. AI based fraud detection, using improved algorithms in data anomaly detections are getting built each day.”
Aarav was carefully listening, deep in his thought, his father snapped fingers in front of him to ask,
“Kiddo, what are you thinking now?”.
“Papa”, Aarav paused, “If government is spending so much to keep up with the security, is digital money actually helping?”
“Yes, Aarav,” his father explained.
“Think about it, before UPI, the government had to spend crores printing notes, transporting them in trucks, securing them with police, and even replacing torn notes.”
He took a break to check whether Aarav was following him. Once assured he has Aarav’s attention, he continued,
“Now with digital payments, printing cost of notes and coin making charges go down immensely. Even less black money and tax evasions as digital transactions leave a digital trail behind. GST, service tax, income tax compliance improves automatically. And there is more of financial inclusions where even a street vendor has a bank account and gets money instantly in his account. On the other hand, yes government has to spend more on cybersecurity, digital infrastructure, invest more in computational power and related resources but the overall savings are higher as transparency in transactions helps better with tax collection. Government and private financial entities are spending in billions to get super-secure servers and high speed data basis and real time AI powered scrutiny checks, pushing us to be more smarter as we are progressing.”
“Oooh” Aarav’s month was left hanging, and he just said,
“Now, I am tired listening to all this, but can I still get the new Hot wheel?”
His father chuckled!
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