THE VALUE OF A RUPEE

Some days back, I had gone to the BSNL office to deposit my phone bill. As customary, it was a long queue and like all normal people, I did not have a choice but to wait for my turn. There were two elderly people standing in front of me discussing all they could to pass their time and then stated a conversation to which I lent a serious ear.

The discussion was focused on the phone bill of one of them and guess the charge, it was only a rupee! The person was standing in the queue just to deposit a rupee! And the argument he was giving was pretty valid. And that was, that if I do not deposit this rupee, this one rupee would become eleven the next month!

I was wondering that in our country where a rupee seems to have lost its value, the government setup in some way was making it count. Not just because that one rupee would rise up to eleven for the gentleman but because that one rupee bill must have cost the BSNL exchequer more than that just for the generation of the bill. The printing of the bill and its delivery to the customer must be, if not more, at least ten rupees and what I was thinking was that how many such bills were being generated? Even if it has to be a small proportion, I am sure that a lot of public money is being wasted on such things and infact, our money, because it is we the citizens who pay taxes to the government exchequer.

In the meantime came the turn of the gentleman to deposit the bill and the lady sitting on the deposit counter could not control  herself and gave a laugh seeing the amount. She gently asked the gentleman that he could have deposited it with the next bill and the gentleman gave her the same argument that by then it would have become eleven for him. He explained to her that what could have been probably done was that they carried forward this one rupee to his next bill. The lady in turn replied that if they had done so, then they would have violated the rule.

Till date, I am wondering that what kind of a system we have where paying a rupee as bill is costing so much time and effort and of course, the amount wasted in its generation. I am still wondering that today when we are talking about Rs.100 losing its value, the government, wittingly or unwittingly, is making us realize that the rupee has not lost its sheen. Only if we could plug such gaps in our system, we can probably save a lot of time and money and invest the same in the development of the nation.