codema.in

Proposing a Cash Friendliness Index of cities/regions to help travellers who avoid digital payments

BS Badri Sunderarajan Thu 5 Feb 2026 6:14AM Public Seen by 44

This is in context about recent discussion around UPI and the fact that life without UPI is relatively difficult in some cities but not a problem at all in others. We hear various anecdotes in the group like "you can't get around in Bangalore without UPI" or "it's very easy to get change in Delhi". This also leads to differences in perception where people in cash-friendly cities advocate avoiding UPI entirely whereas people in less friendly cities claim that it is impractical.

It would be good to collect this kind of information in a more formal way so that we have a clearer picture of what we are up against—similar to how we are collecting information in the wiki on where NUUP (*99#) works and where it doesn't. Then we could for example focus on low CFI areas to get NUUP working properly there, and people can remember to keep more change handy when travelling to such areas. (Similarly, they could remember to collect more change when going to a high CFI area 😉)

My idea is that people can rate every cash transaction that involved taking change, which would over time build up a database we can use to compute cash-friendliness.

Here is a first draft for different levels of cash-friendliness that we could record for each transaction, along with associated details of degree and proportion. Suggestions for changes in level amounts/definitions/ordering are welcome.

Levels

  • Level 0: no change given at all

  • Level 0.5: partial change given (a few rupees at the end left out) or sweets given instead of change

  • Level 1: change added to credit account to be given "next time"

  • Level 2: change given after some hesitation/argument/negotiation

  • Level 3: change given immediately (as it should be)

  • Level 4: change offered or obtained proactively (eg. they borrow it from a neighbouring shop), or extra change given (a few rupees extra)

  • Level 5: change given without any transaction (eg. you ask a shop to change money for you and they do it; bus conductor offering extra change to anyone who wants)

Degree of change involved

If partial change was given/held back, this is the remainder amount not the full change amount)

  • Amount:

    • upto ₹3

    • upto ₹5

    • upto ₹10

    • upto ₹50

    • upto ₹200

    • more than ₹200 (hopefully this never happens!)

  • Difference in digits from full change amount (eg. if change is ₹3 for a payment of ₹297 then the amount is 3 digits - 1 digit = 2 digits). This is mainly to get an idea of the percentage.

Other things to think about:

  • To start with, we will only have enough data for cities. However, in future perhaps we could have more fine-grained data like smaller regions or specific shops/outlets. Do we want to plan for this? If so, we should have an option to collect exact location info (eg. OSM location) but it would also increase friction in recording data at all. (My current plan is not so ambitious; I am thinking maybe a few data points for each area just enough to get a sense of what that place is like. So, a bit more formal way of manually asking people in the group each time but not exhaustive in any statistical sense.)

  • How should this data be collected? We have a wiki page for NUUP but that has some limitations and can only collect one value per region. We can maybe have some kind of form, or better, a chatbot/ad-hoc command to quickly enter it. If we make a Free Software UPI app we can include this as an option and maybe even make it an general expense-tracking app. Also, in terms of who collects the data, I am thinking of restricting it to the community (at least to start with) to reduce change of spam/invalid data.

  • We also need to decide what levels of cash-friendliness to assign to each location (after aggregating individual transaction data)

LIT

Life is Tetris Thu 5 Feb 2026 7:08AM

I imagine things are so expensive in dilli that no change comes back ;-)

Maybe less concentrated cities will give a good sense of things.

BS

Badri Sunderarajan Sat 7 Feb 2026 4:34AM

@Life is Tetris haha. That is actually one of the less expensive cities though—see Bangalore for example (and maybe Bombay?)

LIT

Life is Tetris Sat 7 Feb 2026 9:34AM

@Badri Sunderarajan hmmm, didn't know dilli wasn't expensive to get by in (only real estate is expensive?).

One thing about change in Bangalore is, people who arrange for change in quantity for shopkeepers charge for it. So the vicious cycle is even tighter.

BS

Badri Sunderarajan Sun 8 Feb 2026 4:09AM

@Life is Tetris interesting, I didn't know about the change thing. How does that work? Do shops in other cities rely on such people as well?

The only time I've seen it firsthand was at the retail level in Salem where a shop running payphones also "sold" change at the rate of ₹5 for three ₹1 coins.

RD

Ravi Dwivedi Fri 6 Feb 2026 7:26PM

@Badri Sunderarajan My city Meerut seems to be a level 5 city, but mostly shops who know you will give you change without transaction (and it is not customary to ask strangers for change, but I suppose it is possible to get). That said, I cannot imagine not getting change (sorry for the double negation!) without transaction in North India.

There are a few nuances, though. At my place, most transactions are recurring. Like, you buy fruits/corn/peanuts/vegetables/dairy daily from the same shop. This makes it easy to repay the amount the next day in case they don't have enough change, but I don't remember the last time I had to do that. So, it is not that common to add it to the credit account.

Furthermore, locals selectively give 500 rupee notes to bigger shops. Like, not giving a 500 rupee note for a 40 rupee ride to an e-rickshaw driver, but it would be fine giving that amount to a bakery for a transaction of the same amount.

On another note, I got a lot of change from a couple of banks a few months ago (around 15,000 rupees), and I still have a lot of 100 rupee notes (around 5000 rupees) leftover from that transaction. So, I don't need change for a long time! And you now know where to get the change.

It seems like removing the 2000 rupee note from circulation has helped the cause. I only used to give 2000 rupee notes at bookstores or upscale restaurants (and that too outside of Meerut).

BS

Badri Sunderarajan Sat 7 Feb 2026 4:51AM

@Ravi Dwivedi good to know. Maybe you can add a few dozen of your transactions to the data set and it would give solid evidence about Meerut's CFI rating 😉

Do you think we should also mark whether a transaction is recurring or not? We can define "recurring" as being a known shop in the sense that the people know you personally and you make purchases from there regularly (or the equivalent for auto drivers etc.)

The part about selectively giving larger notes makes sense. It's part of the reason I added the "amount" and "difference in digits" fields but I guess that doesn't cover it completely. Can you think of some other way we can record this? I do the same and it's partly based on the fact that larger shops are more likely to have spare change while a bus conductor for example is limited by what they collected on that day.

There is also an etiquette in offering change. For example, if I'm buying a ₹7 bus ticket (and assuming I'm low on ₹5 coins) I would usually offer ₹12 or ₹22 if I had it rather than ₹10 or ₹20.

Removing ₹2,000 notes has definitely helped even here. When they were around, everyone would try to get rid of them as quickly as possible! I remember in the beginning they were so common that the banks didn't even have enough change to give people their monthly ₹1,000 old age pension, and they instead gave ₹2,000 between two people asking them to share it somehow 🙄

I think in low CFI places like Bangalore it is something of a vicious cycle because shops don't have change, therefore pushing people to use digital payments, which means they continue to have less change (and less cash in general). Making change is often a two-way process, like in my above bus example where I am getting more ₹5 coins and ₹10 notes and the bus conductor is getting more ₹2 coins which can be used in future transactions. Maybe North India (based on what you said above) has managed to stay out of that cycle but not overadopting noncash payments.

It would be interesting to also note down how widespread UPI and PoS are and whether that affects CFI. My suspicion is that it doesn't (places without UPI/PoS would obviously have high CFI, but my guess is that supporting UPI/POS doesn't automatically reduce CFI)

BS

Badri Sunderarajan Sat 7 Feb 2026 6:09AM

By the way @Ravi Dwivedi the levels given there are for transactions not cities. We still have to decide how to convert those into city ratings. One easy way is to just take the average of all transaction ratings. But maybe we can have thresholds with levels like A, B, C...? We can decide that once we have more data.

Anyway, I got your point that Meerut has a very high CFI 😀