Nearly 50 days after the announcement of demonetisation, the proportion of Indians who believe that the pain has been worth it is at its lowest level yet, new data from a CVoter-Huffpost-BW opinion poll indicates. While still high, support has fallen among the poor, a growing share of whom also say that the note ban has been disastrous for them personally.
The poll was conducted for The Huffington Post and Business World by CVoter on December 26-27, as part of its regular tracking poll covering 1,281 randomly selected respondents in 427 Parliamentary constituencies across 26 States in 11 languages. The data was weighted to the known population profile, and the margin of error was +/- 3% at the national level and +/- 5% at the regional level. The previous rounds were conducted on December 19-20, December 8, November 28-29 and November 21.
Overall, the share of those who say that demonetisation now poses little-to-no problem to them remains nearly the same over the last three weeks at roughly three out of four people. Between last week and this week, the share of those who say the note ban has been personally difficult for them rose only in semi-urban areas and among the poor.
The share of those who say that the inconvenience has been worth it is at its lowest level yet, at under 80 per cent. Support fell sharply in semi-urban areas and among the poor.
The share of those who think that the implementation of demonetisation was "good" has also fallen to its lowest level, and is now just over 50%.
While Prime Minister Narendra Modi requested 50 days from his fellow Indians for the banking system to get back on track, it is clear that this is far from being the case; 15% of people are still spending almost the whole day in ATM queues and this figure is 20% in the case of the poor.