Plastic Money in India: Trends, Issues and Prospects

After demonetization, various alternate means to cash were introduced in the country. Some of these had been around for a while but due to our dependency on cash, were not that popular. The most common of these methods are use of plastic money-credit and debit card. India saw a huge rise in use of plastic money for transactions post demonetization. But this declined and stagnated once new currency notes became easily available. The present paper tries to understand as to why people remain evasive of using plastic money in place of cash, even though it provides so many benefits. The paper makes use of secondary data to highlight the spurt in use of credit and debit cards post demonetization and the reasons for stagnation of this growth. The research has been done with the objective of finding out what hampers the growth of alternatives to cash in India.