Dear Mr Modi

If you want to increase the tax-paying economy without causing pain, the secret is incentives. India faces the same problems which affected Greece, but on a much larger scale. Businesses are paid in cash, and do not declare their earnings or pay appropriate tax. The solution in Europe was to require receipts for each purchase, but this law was often ignored. What was used instead was a temporary incentive, if a person collects receipts for everything they buy, they can get an income tax discount. The government loses some tax revenue in the short term, but gains visibility of payments to tax other businesses and individuals.
Collecting receipts is an enormous task, and I do not recommend this. India does not have the infrastructure for tax-system receipts, and even in Greece it was a labour intensive system. As the Indian government has recognised, cashless is the answer, providing visibility of transactions with no additional paper documents.
Unfortunately I believe India has taken the wrong approach to achieving a cashless economy, using the stick not the carrot, cancelling people's money, using threats. It can actually cost businesses more to use card payments, and I read that it can cost more to buy petrol with card. After the introduction of GST (goods and services tax) this difference will be even higher. It is the opposite of an incentive, it's a disincentive, this is a punishment for using card payment. The temporary reduction in fees at petrol stations is insufficient, barely 2 months? What you need is to make using card the cheaper way to pay, and usage will quickly increase. To do this provide an incentive for card use.
For each income-tax paying consumer, refund 20% of the tax paid for each rupee paid by card or electronic method. For example this would reduce an effective tax rate of 30% to 24%, but only for traceable money. I believe in India the tax on the lowest bracket has been lowered from 10% to 5%, but without any condition of cashless spending!
If cashless does increase the money lost in any incentive will come back to the government anyway. Each business will need to prove it's outgoings to avoid tax on profit becoming tax on revenue, and so it will need to pay people and suppliers electronically. This means more people now have traceable payments. More people will want to pay by card. This will make consumers really demand (not forced) card payment to each business. The tax discount will give consumers the feeling of a benefit, more money in the pocket, while vastly increasing the tax revenue.
I am an engineer, I see a system, and I try to fix the system using the minimum effort.

Losing my religion

I lie on the bed gazing at the spinning ceiling fan.
Goa... Still only in Goa.
Every time I wake up I think I'm going to wake up back in the jungle... When I was home all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.
I'm here a week now... waiting for a train... getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker. Each time I look around the walls moved in a little tighter.
Intro: cue 'the doors'.

Arambol (Saigon/ Goa) is a shock to the senses. Scooters and motorbikes are everywhere, filling the streets, almost nobody walks. The motorbikes are mostly premium Royal Enfield bikes, considered classic in India. These bikes have larger capacity engines 350cc-500cc, and some produce the irritating crack-crack-crack sound that makes bikers such a popular group. The driving feels reckless for the nearly pedestrian town center.

This place is not my native habitat, I end up in a slightly more expensive room (£8/night) that is the height of luxury after my beach life. Attached bathroom, running fresh water, no less than 3 sinks, mirror, food area with a knife, and not a rat in sight. This must truly be a place for a king.

The culture of Goa isn't me, I'm not one for yoga, tantra, massage, drinking or partying. The 150+ restaurants, cafes and bars have little to offer me. With a shaved head I'll never quite fit in with the white dreads, and don't have the appetite to cover myself in beads and tattoos. Give me a thick layer of mud or dust any day.

The trinket sellers are everywhere. In the afternoons there is a hippie market, with an endless row of tat sellers along the beach. Each has claimed a metre or two of sand and laid their collection of beads, jewellery and shiny things on a cloth. The wares are all the same, each stand more identical than the last. At night every seller has a lamp to illuminate their spread of tat. I recognise the sight from lamp fishermen on the shores of Kerala... Fishing for hippie rupees.

This town isn't India, the longer I stay the softer I get.

Kamat plus

A rambling list of trivia from a marathon bus journey, which almost retraces the steps of the Russian affair some 4 years previously. The route has many changes, starting at Om beach, via Gokarna, Ankola, Karwar, Margao, Panjim, Mapusa, Arambol to Arambol beach.

On the bus we pass a novel 'kamat plus' building. I'm used to kamat hotels (hotel meaning restaurant) which are a chain of south Indian restaurants. The 'Kamat plus' concept appears to be vegetarian restaurant plus hardware and paints. A true one stop shop!

This feels like progressive Karnataka, away from the dusty inland towns. A schoolgirl sits beside me, and so I make a comfortable gap, remembering the cultural rules of before. This gap is quickly seized by another schoolgirl. The bus is soon packed full anyway. I glance at the schoolwork of the boy on my left, and girl on my right. Both are studying in English. Despite what Google tries to tell me of the potential audience of 550m Hindi speakers, English is bigger. It's a valuable asset in the expanding state capital of Bengaluru.

We pass what might be a dead body by the side of the road. A man laying face down in the dirt by an incomplete lane of the highway, dressed in the almost ubiquitous check shirt and brown trousers. It's about 9am, and has been light for 3 hours. When I have seen Indian people sleep on the ground it's normally wrapped in a sheet, laid on the back or side, with the head towards the road. I did once find a man in a similar state in Nepal who turned out to be very, very drunk.

In Goa the road is briefly blocked as an oncoming car tries to overtake stationary traffic on a narrow bridge. The stalemate takes a minute to resolve, and then over the bridge it gets worse. A whole road of stationary traffic trying to overtake each other, blocking both directions. Me first.

I stop in Mapusa to get some spendable cash. Getting cash that businesses accept is a challenge post cash ban, the state bank ATM has a queue of 17 people. But I find the paydirt! A bank of Baroda ATM with no queue and a supply of Rs500 notes. If I withdraw over Rs2000 the money includes the stifling Rs2000 bank note, and so I withdraw Rs1500 at a time, again, and again, and again. After the frenzy is over I have a wallet stuffed with real money. I have been careful to choose a bank card with no per-withdrawal minimum fee, bank debit cards often come with a £3 charge for foreign ATMs which is punitive for small withdrawals.

Goa has the worst buses. For some reason it lacks the state-owned bus service which makes getting around south India so pleasant. Local bus operators play a game of sardines with locally-built overgrown minibuses, each about two thirds the size of an actual bus. I spend the agonising journey to Arambol as one of the 50 sardines packed onto a 30-something capacity bus. Standing pressed against the passengers on each side, with my neck painfully cocked due to the 175cm high ceiling. Any unanticipated speed bump thumps my head into the roof.

I arrive 10 hours and 6 buses after my start

An English episode

I'm sat opposite two English ladies, both 44. I start with these details because they are otherwise anonymous and have little else in common. The first lady, name omitted, though nothing unflattering is to be said, has traveled well. She first visited the beach 25 years previously and has returned to see how it has changed. Just about everything, as it turns out, but she isn't about to pass judgement. I'll call her the fairer English lady, and give an account of a meek character used to weathering criticism of her life choices. Living as a small scale vegetable farmer in Spain, and raising her son off the grid, after his childhood accompanying her world travels. She has the crowning jewel now to refute all parenting critics after her variously educated son studied and passed both GCSEs and A-levels within a year and a half, and now studies on one of the most prized university courses in the UK. I feel slightly ashamed when she is browbeaten by the resident Scotch-Dutch pseudoscience hippie. But not beyond recovery, and there is a joint recommendation that TED talks are worth a watch.
The second lady, to be called the fiery lady, made her introduction by demonstrating her exclusivity with the presence of the Scotch Dutch hippie. The near violent confrontation exposes teeth and bone on each side. The hippie disappears with such subtlety that I notice by the absence of his coffee. This fiery lady seems to be in a bit of a state. From what I gather between the "fucking mates" and the "fucking well proper" I try and pick out the truth. I could call her an unreserved character, but she puts it more succinctly "yes I know I'm a cunt". "Sorry sorry". But it's more than this, she isn't well, and may have been drinking. The events are distinctly public, as anyone present would have seen, but should be read without judgement.
Unfortunately at moments the other customers catch her attention. She loudly expresses a desire to lick the head of a par-bald Germanic-looking man. Later an unfortunate Indian troupe in silly hats catch her attention.
"Fucking knob head"
"You in the hat with the string"
"You look like a right knob head"
The Indian man speaks with the waiter in Kannada (local language)
"You know wot a prat you look like in that hat"
She is equally graceful on the phone, to what may be some kind of acquaintance.
"Send me money"
"I'm giving you fucking 24 hours right, or I will fucking burn your huts down"
Both the fiery lady and the psedoscience hippie have decided it's ok to criticise my body at various times. This is rather annoying! I am all too aware of the ugly vanity of the beach without these critics.

I fear some impending catastrophe in the guest house as the numbers of alcoholics, gorillas, mental health cases, doddering old fools, rats, cockroaches and hypocrites rise. Some kind of fireworks are due.

Time to leave

Half of my attempts to swim beyond the bay result in a whimpering retreat. The jellyfish have claimed the ocean, and they let me know it. My last refuge, where I could perform my slow and inefficient stroke in peace, is taken from me. Despite my fantasies of taking revenge on these lurking menaces with some kind of adapted mosquito net, I have accepted defeat. It is hard to call a further attempt anything other than masochism.

The story goes that overfishing has disrupted the food chain, which leads to jellyfish. The horizon is filled with fishing boats from dawn to dusk, it seems plausible.

Great Apes

Pete
Pete
Pete
Pete
The cry of the north European gorilla can be heard breaking the warm afternoon air. A brief slurred exchange, and it rises into shuffling lunging waddling motion. The shoulders hunched forward, and the arms held to the side forming part of a fixed wide circle around the belly. It stops at the beer fridge to forage, picking up a beer in each hand, held fixed at a 45 degree angle. Off to accost some unfortunates at the front of the guest house. "Hey, where you going" slurs one great ape. The speach is slow and often incomprehensible. Apparently they also have access to other drugs, but this nearly comatose state must be considered wakefulness. The bathing of the largest apes is a sight in itself, lunging and staggering in the shallows, eventually rising and spurting a column of salt water. Utterly majestic creatures.

Beach bum III

Back on Om beach Gokarna, idle, aimless. The same familiar faces are here, but something has changed. Everything is reflected in myself, as I am far from a neutral observer, it feels spent. The same tank-top wearing lads and lasses who behave so impeccably in Thailand, Laos, and Bali have added Gokarna to the end of a Goa trip. It was a gradual but inevitable shift, the travelers are fewer, and the Goa goers are more. Welcome to new Palolem.*

This week there are no motorbikes for hire, the rickshaw drivers have been on strike to demand this. The police have duly seized any hired bike with Karnataka plates. This will change with enough trips to Bengaluru, bikes with new rental approved numberplates are already appearing. Anything to appease the land mafia (the excessive headcount of rickshaw drivers) or the sea mafia (the extortionate cartel of boat owners controlling the water).

Without convenient motorbikes I resorted to other measures: pedal power, and the still bountiful state bus company. The state buses cost only pence, and serve just about every hamlet of the state. Most tourists seem unaware of this now, and travel exclusively by private "sleeper"** buses, like lambs to the police extortion post.

I explore to the north, and to the south, but could not find the beach of my mind. Still, it's about the journey isn't it. I make a trip to the beach known as paradise under my own steam, by sea***. I haven't seen people swimming often, it must have gone out of fashion. Instead the popular exercise seems to be a morning jog by the water. Paradise is a little cleaner than I remember, but a little busier than one might imagine.

*Palolem is a 2-week tourist town in south Goa, where the second hand book shops collect a history of whatever pulp was popular last year.

**Only very heavy sleepers have a chance of sleeping, though the low rumble of the engine is pleasing, the occasional horn blast or launch into the air keeps gentler souls awake.

***It turns out swimming beyond the bay is ill advised, jellyfish.

Rickety old government bus

This, it's my paranoia, fearing left behinds in Modi's prosperity ambitions. Such as the ATM guard who now protects a machine where the only note is several days of his pay. For the rich tourist the new Rs2000 bank note is also a bit of a pain, when your expenses are in the range Rs10 to Rs700, and change is not easily available. The game of change conservation begins afresh!

Actually this is something of an understatement, nobody who can avoid it wants to touch a Rs2000 note. It's a giant white elephant but it's all that is left in the ATMs. When the average Indian might be living on Rs400 per day what use is 5 days money in a note. The median income is far lower due to the high proportion of agricultural workers, below Rs200 per day. Imagine trying to spend a £250 note!

The same people were gently encouraged to deposit any money in a bank by the immediate cancellation of the old high value notes. Let's hope the pain is worth it.

An Indian couple in the street approach me and ask for change for a Rs2000 note. They look like tourists. The man stands looking slightly lost, rolling the note in his fingers. This is not how you hold money, it really is toxic.

Hypocrites unite

I watched 'winter sleep', a Turkish language film probably catering for the international-film-buff market. The protagonist is a hypocrite, who blogs, to the silent despair of his wife. Story told, who is anyone to write about anything.

I'll begin slowly. Bengaluru was pleasant, I met a friend living in a nice neighbourhood. Wide roads, white painted 3-4 storey blocks of flats, palm trees and the odd public park. Not dissimilar to a somewhere in southern Europe, until you spot a cow in the road. There are signs of change in the last few years, card payments, drivers wearing seatbelts. Apparently the police can report offences using a phone, which is recorded and sent to the registered address. An Uber driver shows us his list of violations, including stopping on a busy road. Uber and an Indian equivalent are popular here, cheap rate, no haggling. I'm told it's not so popular with the competing rickshaw drivers.

Despite this efficiency the traffic is terrible, and the pollution deposits a black film on your skin, nose and eyes daily. I'll daydream a little, a whole city car ban, electric transport only. It would require an exceptionally strong government! The first stage of the city metro is nearly almost not-quite compete after a decade of construction, but the city's popularity demands more!