India Clings to Cash, Even as Tech Firms Push Digital Money<br />Anusheel Shrivastava, a top Kantar executive in India, said his firm found<br />that 6 percent of mobile phone users made at least one digital transaction a day in 2017, up from 2 percent in 2016.<br />ALIGARH, India — Signs and banners for Paytm, India’s biggest digital payments service, festoon Pooran<br />Singh’s cellphone shop, where people drop in all day to add data or talk time to their prepaid phones.<br />“In India, we’re going to see a similar rise,” Mr. Sengupta said in November, shortly after Google introduced Tez, a payments app for India.<br />The scene in Mr. Singh’s shop underscores a persistent reality of India’s economy: People prefer cash for most routine transactions, despite intensive efforts by the government<br />and global technology companies to lure them onto digital platforms.<br />“People recharge in cash,” Mr. Singh said, after a young man handed him 20 rupees, about 32 cents, to top up his mother’s phone.
