Six years after demonetisation of high value currency to weed out black money in circulation and check the growth of the parallel economy, anecdotal evidence reveals that people are still paying or accepting black money in real estate transactions, says a survey.
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“People are still selling and buying products like hardware, paints and many other household and office paraphernalia and also delivering services without proper receipts,” said the survey by LocalCircles, a community social media platform. As much as 44 per cent of those surveyed who bought a property in the last 7 years saying that they had to pay a component in cash is something worth noting, it said.
It said property transactions emerged as the top area of cash usage from a value per transaction standpoint in the 2021 survey. “The responses revealed that 8 per cent of the 11,499 respondents to the query had paid over 50 per cent in cash. Of the remaining, a whopping 35 per cent refused to divulge, 21 per cent claimed they had paid no cash during the transaction, 15 per cent had paid between 30-50 per cent of the transaction in cash, 13 per cent had paid 10-30 per cent cash and the remaining 8 per cent had paid up to 10 per cent of the value in cash,” the survey said.
The situation may look to have improved compared to the survey in November 2021 when 70 per cent of the respondents had admitted to paying cash as part of the transaction for property acquired in the previous 7 years. One encouraging sign is that as against 16 per cent who admitted to having paid over half of the amount in cash in 2021, the new survey reveals that the percentage of such cases has dropped to 8 per cent in the new survey.
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However, the 35 per cent not divulging must also be taken into account and it is safe to assume that many of these individuals did pay some cash in the transactions they conducted but they are just not comfortable disclosing the same, it said.
According to the survey, one of the other areas where cash use was reported as high by people in the 2021 survey was paying cash for home repairs, salaries of household staff and beauty services. Respondents were asked in the 2022 survey, “In the last 12 months, for which categories of services have you paid in cash (without receipt)?” it said.
As much as 20 per cent pointed to salaries of domestic staff, 3 per cent for travel expenses (category 2), 10 per cent for personal services/ home repairs.
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Out of 10,224 respondents to another query on use of cash, 62 per cent pointed to groceries, eating out and food deliveries. Individually there were no positive responses to the categories – buying gadgets and long-term assets or valuable items.
