Starting midnight on 8th of November, all currency denominations of Rupees 500 and 1,000 ceased to be legal tenders in India in a surprise move by the government of India. The move is supposedly a part of a crackdown on black money.
The purpose of demonetization is purportedly to restrain the shadowy economy of India i.e. a parallel economy, counterfeit currency in circulation and terror financing. Although I agree that this is a good move and a bold one at that by our Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one needs to consider the fact that it is not cash where bulk of the black money is stashed. Most of the black money – over 95% – is kept in the form of land, buildings or gold or kept abroad.
However in this post, I won’t comment on the politics or economics of it or will this move will bring out the intended result. This post is intended to illumine to fellow travelers – especially the travelers from overseas on how to cope with money matters if you are traveling to or traveling in India.
Many stories have emerged recently of international tourists facing currency problems. Many measures were announced by the government of India to allay their fear and inconvenience faced by the international travelers. One was that archaeological survey of India (ASI) – which take care of the protected monuments like Taj Mahal in India and charges entry fees – will accept the older currency note of 500 and 1000 denomination.
However, even as I writing this the date of acceptance is now over. Only new notes of 500 and 2000 denominations and the older valid denominations of 100, 50, 20, and 10 will now be accepted. Government also announced that airports as well as railway stations will accept the older notes.
As I am writing this, things have stabilized with the re-introduction of new 500 rupees note. New notes are also available but not all ATMs are functioning. It is because the ATMs needs to be re-calibrated to dispense the newer denomination currency notes. This is a cause of inconvenience to not just Indian citizens but also to international travelers.
So how do you cope up with demonetization in India if you are an international traveler?
Not all businesses in India accept cards. If you are a budget traveler than this is truer for you as guest houses, home stays, buses and taxis/auto rickshaw don’t normally accept app or plastic payment. Even if you decide to withdraw money from ATMs, it will take hours in the queue before you get to withdraw cash. If the queue is longer, more chances are that ATM will run dry before your turn.
Another thing to note is that currently the withdrawal limit set by the government is Rupees 20,000 per week which works out to $300 per week. It is supposed to last for fifty days from the date of announcement of demonetization that is 08th of November.
Note: From today onward (24th Nov 2016), the discontinued currency notes of rupees 500 and rupees 1000 denominations cannot be exchanged but can only be deposited.
Tips for money matters in India post demonetization for international travelers
One could bring in up to rupees 25,000 of Indian currency notes issued by the government of India and Reserve Bank of India.
One could also exchange the foreign currency they are carrying at the airport or at authorized forex counters. However, tourists arriving in India can only exchange their foreign currency up to a value of rupees 5000.
Use plastic money as much as you can at the restaurants, for transportation and to pay for accommodation. It is widely accepted in all major cities especially if they are popular tourist destinations.
Recently, many small businesses – even chaiwallahs – have started accepting money through apps like PayTM. With PayTM, you could make instant mobile recharge, bill payment, data card recharge, utility bill payment and even metro card recharge in Delhi.
Whenever shopping or buying anything or even paying for bills in hotels or restaurants, insist on rupees 100 or the newly introduced rupees 500 currency note. You might find it difficult to dispose of rupees 2000 currency notes for small purchases
Withdraw as much as you can while you are in city. Also remember that daily limit is just rupees 2000 which might be increased to rupees 4000 in coming days.
Try to make most of the payments in cities using cards. That will help you accumulate some cash before you head out for remote or rural areas or the Himalayas where there is much lesser ATMs and banks connectivity.
Only travel to small town and rural areas if you have enough rupees 100 and rupees 500 notes. Rupees 2000 could cause trouble due to lack of change.
If you are wondering whether there is an SEO benefit of SSL migration i.e. moving your website from HTTP to HTTPS, then the answer is both yeas and no. Despite Google’s announcement last year that HTTPS encryption is an important factor in Google search engine ranking, there is no dramatic change in search position even if you do move your website from HTTP to HTTPS.
But there are more good reason than bad to switch your website to the secure version of web. Google as well as other major search engines are pushing hard to make web more secure. While offering secure surfing over Internet is one reason to switch to HTTPS there are other reasons as well as to why should be migrating your site – if you haven’t done so already – sooner than later.
Being secure is foremost reason and then there is the performance factor as well as SEO ranking. Secure sites also mean you get better referral data in Analytics. As an SEO or digital marketer this is one of the major benefits as the referral data from HTTPS site to HTTP site get lost and are recorded as direct traffic in the Google Analytics.
Google recently rolled out mobile-first index. What it implies is that Google will now prefer the mobile version of a website/page and will rank its search even for desktop users based on mobile experience/performance of your website. It is said that nearly 50% of the web users abandon a site that takes 3 second or more to load. There are many ways to increase your site speed which include optimization of images using lesser CSS and Js or combining multiple CSS and Js. Then there are server side techniques like enabling browser caching and compression.
However even doing this doesn’t help as much as switching to the accelerated mobile page (AMP). AMP is an open source initiative to make web working lightning fast by taking advantage of various technical approaches. That is how Google wants the web to work.
If you work on a large website or use a CMS other than WordPress, you will need a developer to implement it as it requires a lot of coding. I have implemented AMP on several large websites that I work with, it’s a tedious process and on top of it you need to have a secure domain i.e. SSL certified site. Before implementing AMP I also had to do the https migration of some sites.
However if you use WordPress, like I do for my personal block, implementing AMP is as easy as pie. All you need to do is download the AMP plugin by Automatic. Yoast offer yet another popular plugin for AMP in WordPress but I had trouble using it especially the Analytics part.
Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) for WordPress
Do I need to implement AMP for my WordPress site?
There are a few questions you should ask yourself and depending upon their answer you’ll know if you need AMP or not.
My site is mobile friendly and attracts good amount of traffic and I have also monetized my site
If yes then you should go for AMP
I am a news/blog site with loads of mobile friendly pages and I have monetized my site
Yes, you do need AMP
I am a very big publisher but my site is not mobile friendly
You need to get your site mobile friendly first. It’s easy on WordPress as you have a wide variety of responsive themes available in different categories.
So how do you implement AMP for WordPress?
Step 1. Simple, log in to your site, click on add new plugin and search for AMP. You will most probably find AMP plugin by Automatic on top of search results.
Step 2. Click on install and then activate.
It should be working now. You can check so by opening any URL of your site except for the homepage and then appending the URL with /amp/
If it is not so then click on view source (Keyboard shortcut for the same is CTRL+U). There perform a search to look for: amphtml. It should guide you to your AMP URL.
Now comes the validation part to check if it is working correctly or not. You can do so using Chrome Browser Console or the easier way to do it is to visit this link: https://validator.ampproject.org/
Remember you need to paste the AMP version of your URL.
Also Note: Don’t forget to compare your webpage performance before and after implementing AMP using either Google Pagespeed Insights, GTmetrix or Pingdom to get a picture of where your site stand post-AMP.
Now that easy is done, comes the fun part.
Now you gotta play with a little of coding. Hey wait. No need to get scared. As I said earlier, it is as easy as pie.
First and foremost of all, you need access to your website’s FTP.
AMP plugin doesn’t give you option to do any setting or editing through WordPress.
If you don’t have it talk to your developer/server/hosting guy. You need just your server path, username and a password along with port number to make it work. Download free software like Filezilla or AceFTP and install it and configure your site’s FTP.
Now once you have logged into your FTP server, you need to be very cautious for any change can make or break your site. Never use Overwrite command to upload file at the first instance, use Rename command. And for any further changes that day only use overwrite command and not the rename command. Or better still take a backup of the files you would be making changes in.
For our task at hand, we require only three and thankfully they belong to plugin folder so no harm done anyways.
Now here are the things we will do to make the stale AMP version a bit lively. Three basic things that you will need for our WordPress AMP.
Google Analytics
Social Sharing
A Cute Header Menu with Sitelinks
Let’s start with Google Analytics which I believe is the most important tweaking to be made. You don’t want to lose out on Analytics data which will further offer valuable insight into user behavior and your site performance.
Here are the steps to install Google Analytics for WordPress AMP
Create a new property by logging into Analytics. I believe you are familiar with it; if not here’s how to do it.
>> Log into Google Analytics
>> Click on Admin and you will see three heads namely Account, Properties and Views
>> Click on Property dropdown and click on Create New Property
>> Name Your Site e.g. Example AMP and enter your URL, select industry and time zone and click on Get Tracking ID
>> Copy the UA-XXXXXXX-X part which we will need later.
Connect your FTP server and then navigate to public_html, then wp-content folder, then plugins folder, then amp folder, then templates and download single.php
Open single.php and just after the <head> tag paste:
Replace UA-XXXXXXXX-X part with the code that you generated in last part of Step 1
Save the file and upload it and lo and behold you have your analytics part done.
To check it open a page of your site and then go to the Reporting tab in your Google Analytics, navigate to Real Time Overview and you should be seeing 1 visitor. It’s the confirmation that your code is working.
Integrating Social Sharing Buttons on WordPress AMP
You want your visitors to share the great content that you are publishing. Right?
Here are the steps to integrate social sharing button for WordPress AMP so that visitors could share your great content.
Step 1. Once again, download your updated single.php or better don’t close it till you are through this post and just before </head> paste this:
Note: Replace app id with your own if you use it or generate one on Facebook.
Step 3. Now search for <footer class=”amp-wp-article-footer”> and just above it paste:
The above code again. Whereas the above code will render at the top of your post, the below code will let the social share button render at the bottom of your post.
Step 4. Now save and upload the file. Refresh any of your post’s amp version and now you will see some cool social buttons through which your visitors could share your great content. Bravo!
Now comes the beautification part of your header which is too bland with just the name of your site. We are now going to add a menu at the top right corner so that visitors get to navigate to our important categories and can also read about me 🙂
Here how it goes.
Step 1: Open updated single.php file and just above or below the social sharing script in the header that you pasted in the header; post the following code:
What this code will do is it will add a nice Hamburger Menu image. Replace the http link inside amp-img src with the image of your choice or as a bonus you could use the one I am using by keeping the code intact.
Step 4. Now to render the menu we will have to create a <body> tag and add the links that we want to display in our menu inside it. Just paste the below code after the </header> part at the bottom of the file:
Step 2: Find <div class=”amp-wp-content”> line. And below the line paste the the code below
<amp-ad width=350 height=100
type=”adsense”
data-ad-client=”ca-pub-95675557XXXXXXXX”
data-ad-slot=”170XXXXXXX”>
</amp-ad>
Step 3: For ad to be displayed below the post search for do_action( ‘amp_post_template_footer’, $this ); and paste the adsense code before the php starting tag which we used in the previous step.
I am flabbergasted so are some of my friends…Here how one of my friend feels…This is Ravish and he is ravishing to say the least
As a working professional, I want to ask our revered Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who changed your notes Modi? Did you get your “notes” changed before portentous 8 pm announcement? Or did you once again lead by example and convert all your notes beforehand? Perhaps I am social media dumb and missed your twitter photographs. But why aren’t we seeing a twitter post with you waiting for hours in an unnecessary bank queue? Maybe you are too busy, and have five PAs to change your notes, but neither have we seen any other cabinet minister or Mohan Bhagwat ji or for that matter any of India’s esteemed industrialists the Tata’s, Ambanis or Adani stand in queues anywhere.
As I write this, I remember the bank operator telling me, only people with their own identity proof can change their money. So how did you all manage? I am sure the Ambanis, both the brothers, need more than Rs 4000 a day to run their palatial apartments. Excuse my foolishness, but I forget living in Digital India that even their domestic helps, security guards, gardeners, and vegetable vendors may all have Jan Dhan accounts and their salaries are wire-transferred directly into their banks. And such is the case with all vegetable vendors from Delhi to Chennai, for most of them carry card machines, don’t they?
I am against Black Money, but this policy doesn’t seem to restrict it . In fact all the people with the real black money are still laughing maybe as they see little fish being caught in your net. Please don’t fool us with Bollywood style imaginations of “black money mattress” and “black money pillows”, your finance minister has already told us the real intention of this undemocratic, furtive move. “Demonetisation decision was a logical step in journey towards cashless society” said Mr Jaitley. “Cashless society” well why use euphemisms simply call it a ‘MasterCard’ society? Why are you allowing for the Mastercard-isation of the Indian economy. With a single stroke you have given Visa and Mastercard access into every household of India. You have sold thousands, maybe millions of hours of our hard work and labour only to profit foreign banking corporations. Why was this necessary?
Plastic money is technological racism. Think of millions of your country people who have no access to banks; forget banks they are not even literate. You can suddenly steer them to have no access to food or medicines because the money in their pockets has no value. Millions of us are in this dilemma, Why don’t we have the right to use the money we have worked hard to use? And even before you enforce this upon us, why were we given no choice to debate this? Why have you still not made donations to political parties more transparent and only possible through cheques before you took this step? Why did you introduce this at 8pm in the night after Theresa May left India? Did she have something to do with this? Arnab may have quit, some of us Indians would really want to know.
We know why you picked November 8th, is it because this is the day you lost Bihar? Maybe this is also your way of revenge and punishment to the nation. Did you know that farmers, at least all over North India, are waiting to sell their crops and but no one has the money to buy it. Were you thinking for them? How will they sell their crops? This is the last harvest of this year, how will they get money to plant again or even payback their loans? But maybe 60 percent of India is expendable.
You built your campaign on Black money, after which you started to restrict gold, further tried to get maximum number of rural people into the banking system but when nothing worked, you took this jump. I see only a handful who are the beneficiaries of this move. The banks, Mastercard, Visa, and the BJP-UP office.
This move is anti-poor, anti- farmers and undemocratic. This is not about black money, but to strengthen corporate and MNC control on India. This is the reason Walmart India CEO is congratulating you on the Front page of TOI. You have killed the small vendors and made sure India will beg for FDI in retail. Your bosses have killed the Indian vendor and currently replacing them with giant super stores through FDI in retail.
But revenge or not, we know you have rigged the foundation of economic democracy in India. Your move is a slap on your swadeshi voters and subtly heralds the final takeover of India by the new economic world order. As a patriotic citizen of India, I urge my sisters and brothers to think about this move, see beyond the black money rhetoric before it is too late and we lose our sovereignty and our money to a new “Banking Raj” .
