How to fall back in love with your partner, psychologists reveal

Rachel Hosie in The Independent





The saying goes that you can’t help who you fall in love with, and sometimes you just fall out of it too.

But a new study has found that we can in fact control our hearts with our heads more than we thought - psychologists from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Erasmus University Rotterdam found that it’s possible to wilfully increase or decrease how much you love someone.
It’s called ‘love regulation’.

The researchers studied 40 people, twenty of whom were in a long-term relationship, and the other half having recently come out of one - the average time since the break-up was three months.

Each participant was asked to bring in 30 pictures of their current or ex-partner. First, they were asked how infatuated with and attached to the person they felt and had their brainwaves measured - the researchers particularly looked at the Late Positive Potential (LPP) brainwave, which becomes stronger when we focus on something emotionally relevant.

The participants were then told to look at the pictures and think positive thoughts about their partner, their relationship and their future together, before their brain waves and feelings were measured again.

For a second time, the participants were asked to look at their photos but to think negative thoughts. Their feelings and brain waves were then assessed once again.

The study found that after thinking positive thoughts, people reported feeling much more attached to their partners and their LPP brainwaves were stronger.

In contrast, after focusing on negatives, the participants “down-regulated” their feelings, reporting less attachment and weaker LPP brainwaves.

But can we really control love? “Control implies suppressing it and being king or queen of it,” Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David told The Wall Street Journal.

So even if we can’t actually control love, we can shape it.

How to fall back in love:

Make small changes - whether that’s hugging your partner before leaving for work in the morning or greeting them warmly when you come back, it can make a difference.

Smile at them - smiling releases the feel-good chemical dopamine and they’ll likely smile back too.

Think positively - focus on the things you like about your partner, imagine happy times in the future and write them down.

Have sex - even if you don’t feel like it, it’s important and studies show that people are more attractive and attracted to their partners after sex.

Don’t sweat the small stuff - try not to resent your partner for failing to take the bins out or leaving pants on the floor, and remember they didn’t do it because they don’t love you.

Try new things together - it’s proven to help couples feel more attracted to each other.

Ask questions - just like you probably did when you first met, ask each other about your hopes and dreams again.

Theatre of Capitalism - The Annual General Meeting

AN ANNUAL SHAREHOLDERS MEETING MAY NOT SOUND LIKE A PLACE FOR A BOLLYWOOD DENOUEMENT, BUT THESE CORPORATE GATHERINGS ARE AS RIFE WITH TRAGEDY AS THEY ARE WITH FARCE.

Sidin Vadakut in Motherland

Indian films strive for closure. In fact the single most important driving force that powers the narrative in most Indian films is the satisfactory closure of gaping wounds, wounded pride, injustice or vendetta.

Our films may navigate increasingly complex and original ways of achieving this closure. But in the end most of them achieve this through some age-old final-reel tropes. The climactic clash between the forces of good – the outnumbered hero – and the forces of evil – the bad guy and his hordes – is a popular one. The union of cleaved lovers, often involving trains, is canon. Family movies usually feature a reunified, joyous household pardoning the most heinous relatives who, moments earlier, were plotting their wholesale slaughter.

Mani Ratnam’s 2007 feature film Guru, however, ends with the most unique setting for a closing scene of any Indian film: an Annual General Meeting of shareholders.

This might seem like a bizarre choice of scenario. AGMs are a statutory requirement for companies listed on stock exchanges. In most countries in the world listed companies are required to hold at least one meeting a year where shareholders get a chance to vote on important company measures and approve annual statements of accounts.

These meetings can often be very important, highly charged and widely reported in the media. But how can they ever be interesting enough to serve as the closing act of a Bollywood blockbuster?

AGMs can be fun. But not Amitabh Bachchan or Anil Kapoor fun. Surely?

In fact it is a mystery that more blockbuster films don’t use AGMs in their plot. For when it comes to sheer theatricality some Indian AGMs can be every bit a work of performance art as Shahrukh Khan’s latest.



In the summer of 2006 I joined one of India’s grand old manufacturing companies as a consultant. Established well before India became an independent country, the company continues to be one of the best-known names in consumer electricals. Though these days it makes most of its money from industrial products like transformers. It has its headquarters in a shiny skyscraper in one of Mumbai’s most expensive neighbourhoods.

But inside it remains a quaintly old-fashioned company.

At the time I was struggling to make ends meet as a novelist – essentially an income-free profession – and hastily agreed to work for them part-time as part of a new business development team. The team consisted of two people. A vice president who thought big. And the consultant who translated these ideas into spreadsheets. It was a poorly thought-out project from the outset and no one was particularly surprised when it was shut down ten months later.

But in the interim I got paid handsomely, and used the money to get married.

One morning in July 2006, just a few months after we started work on our ill-fated project, I noticed an army of unfamiliar faces trooping in and out of our offices in the head office tower.

This was most rare. The offices mostly housed departments that had nearly nothing to do with the outside world: accounts, legal, corporate HR, statutory and reporting, insider trading, etc. Nobody visited us, not even employees from other departments.

Yet suddenly here was an eccentric group of old men and middle-aged women all lining up to meet the company secretary. Some of them needed help getting in and out of the lifts.

But this was not a company where you went around asking questions. Everything and everybody functioned on a need to know basis. If you needed to know you would know.

The next morning everyone received a directive from human resources. All employees were expected to attend the company’s AGM taking place that morning in the auditorium of a nearby school. Attendance was compulsory. Shuttle buses would be provided.

Outside the venue there was a confusing crowd of people. Schoolchildren bobbed in and out of the crowd trying to grab freebies like baseball caps, and snacks. Irritated employees coagulated into groups and promptly began to bitch about the waste of time. A few business journalists waited for the meeting to start.

But the most voluble group was the same army that had invaded our office the day before. They thronged around a side door, presumably the stage entrance, and made a terrible racket. Some were clearly having arguments.

This was the first time I’d ever been to an AGM. I wasn’t prepared at all for the chaos taking place around me. It seemed ridiculous even by the company’s ancient, peon-employing, stationary-rationing, pay-grade-based-Diwali-gift-giving ways.

Shortly before the designated start-time a series of expensive cars rolled up to the stage entrance. And the top management climbed out. “Dad’s Army” pounced. There was a huge racket as they thronged around the approaching board of directors trying to shake hands and have a quick word. It was not all that different from the way professional wrestlers walk toward the ring through a forest of outstretched hands, distributing high-fives.

What was more remarkable was that the President and the CEO seemed to know several of these rabble-rousers by name.

“Hello, Mr Tripathi? Long time!”

“Mrs Maheshwari, how have you been?”

“We meet again Koshi saab!”

I followed the rest of the employees into the auditorium, still puzzled by all this.

Inside the auditorium two very old men, both well above 60, were tearing into each other. They briefly went silent as the board of directors took the stage, and then resumed immediately.

They argued like schoolchildren. Vigorously, but insubstantially.

“You keep quiet sir! What do you know?”

“I know more than you. You please don’t irritate me today.”

“This is a free country! I will irritate you again and again. What will you do?!”

The men sat right in the middle of the front row. The army all walked in and occupied the seats around them. Not one person tried to stop their bickering. On the stage the board of directors waited for the men to calm down. They didn’t.

Finally the president of the board of directors, let us call him Mr Kumar, walked up to the very edge of the stage, and tried to mediate for peace.

“Mr Joshi I am personally asking you to please calm down.”

“Kumar saab, this man has been continuously irritating me since I came for this meeting…”

The really funny thing was that I was the only person in the entire hall cringing. Nobody else seemed to even care. The employees were fidgety and kept looking at their watches. Most of the journalists fiddled with their mobile phones.

“Who are these irritating people?” I whispered to a colleague. He chuckled into his palm and replied: “Shareholders.”

After a few minutes the old men declared a truce. Everyone settled down. The company secretary walked up to the microphone.

And then the meeting proceeded to descend into complete farce.



Deepak Shenoy, a well-known markets analyst and columnist, says that the father of the old-fashioned annual general meeting in India was Dhirubhai Ambani. Ambani was the first person to convert what was just a statutory requirement for listed companies, into an annual carnival for shareholders.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Ambani elevated Reliance Industries’ AGMs into works of art. A unique form of capitalist theatre in a country that resisted all forms of free market exuberance.

First of all the events were often held in stadiums. Over 50 000 investors bought Reliance’s shares during its initial public offering, India’s first popular listing. Many of them turned up for AGMs. Shenoy says that meetings were held like family functions, inaugurated with ceremonial lamps being lit and prayer sessions. Proxy forms, that allowed shareholders to appoint substitutes to represent them, were in high demand and often sold for large sums of money.

This was not just because they got a chance to see Ambani, perhaps the most famous businessman in India at the time. The forms also had monetary value. Attendees got free gifts including discount coupons from Vimal, Reliance’s textiles retailing arm. All a member of the public had to show to attend these events was a proxy form or proof of ownership of a single share. “A shareholder’s proxy form to attend a Reliance AGM had a sizeable cash value,” says Shenoy, “and for many years there was a booming market for them.”

“Ambani basically created what is known as the equity cult in India,” says Govindraj Ethiraj, veteran business journalist and broadcaster. Before Ambani took Reliance public, Ethiraj explains, the idea of owning equity in
 a company was not very popular. The
 number of retail shareholders were
rare and mostly limited to the small, 
informed groups in the larger cities.

“Ambani changed all that,” recalls Ethiraj. Ambani gave the impression that he was sharing his immense wealth with the public. Thousands upon thousands of people, many of them Gujaratis, bought Reliance stock. And then they began to invest in other companies as well.

By the early 1990s, Ethiraj estimates, this equity cult had exploded to some 20 million people. Ambani was the catalyst for that explosion.

Ambani was a shrewd businessman. He was also a showman. Years before Steve Jobs perfected the art of the keynote, Ambani used his AGMs to enthral the shareholders and the press. But it was not that Ambani was a natural communicator. Ethiraj, in fact, remembers him being less than eloquent. He wasn’t particularly fluent in English. And often spoke in a mishmash of English and Hindi with smatterings of Gujarati. But he knew how to connect with his audience. Perhaps, Ethiraj says, because his delivery seemed so home grown.

There are very few online videos of Dhirubhai Ambani speaking. The rare clip of his talking to investors bristles with energy. As he speaks, Ambani thrusts his hands into the air in front of him. Suddenly he whips his spectacles off. And when he breaks into laughter he does so sincerely, deeply, with a full mouth of teeth.

Ambani made it a point to announce one new initiative at every AGM, a move, says Shenoy, that electrified shareholders in the audience. It is a strategy that Dhirubhai Ambani’s son Mukesh Ambani continues to use to this day. Though Mukesh has inherited little of his father’s aura.

Ambani senior’s theatricality slowly began to spread to other firms. While few others could fill stadiums, they did incentivise shareholders with freebies and coupons. Many meetings began to deal less and less with business and more and more with drama and reward.

It may seem like a waste of time for both parties. But Shenoy says there is a certain logic here. Many of these people who attend AGMs have owned shares for many years. But they seldom own enough to make any serious money. And because they are so small they have no say in the way the company operates. The AGM, he says, is their one chance in the whole year to mooch something off the company.

Back in the school auditorium nobody paid much attention as an assortment of executives read out passages from the annual report. A few business journalists took down notes.

And then at some point the company secretary invited questions from the audience.

There was a mad scramble to raise hands and reach for the mics that were circulating in the first few rows. These were the “mooch seats”. The army of shareholders, most of them pensioners and old housewives who came for the freebies – caps, stationary, discount vouchers – and their moments of glory.

The first question was not a question at all. But verse. A woman read out Urdu couplets that compared the President’s handsome face to the sun, the moon and the stars. There was a smattering of applause. And then another man got up: “Sir, I would also like to share some poetry…” His words were drowned in some hearty geriatric booing.

He got very upset: “Sir! Look sir. They do this every time. When Ms Maheshwari wants to recite poetry nobody complains. But when I want to recite…”

“Boo!”

Once again the President intervened. “How can I not listen to your poetry,” he consoled the poet. “You have been coming to our meetings for so many years. You are like family to me. I request the others to let him speak.”

So they did.

Next another woman got up. “Why has the company stopped the practice of taking shareholders on tours of company premises? Back in the day, when the President’s father used to be in charge, they used to conduct factory tours very frequently.”

The President had a quiver full of apologies. Did the woman have any particular plant in mind?

Of course. The factory in Goa. There was much applause. The company secretary was instructed to organise a trip as soon as possible. The mood in the mooch seats brightened considerably.

Finally there was the first question about business. Why did the company acquire a foreign plant instead of distributing the cash as dividend? This time one of the senior managers answered the question with dubious urgency and accuracy.

A colleague leaned over: “Planted question.”

And thus the next 15 minutes passed. Poetry interspersed with shameless praise of the board of directors sandwiched between planted questions. Until one terribly grumpy looking man stood up and asked why the AGM was scheduled the same day as HDFC Bank’s AGM.

“I am a shareholder in both companies. How can I attend both? You must understand…”

This finally managed to upset the President. “Conflicts are inevitable,” he said. “And if there is an overlap shareholders must pick whichever one they like.” The grumpy old man stood up, picked up a weathered old leather bag and left the auditorium.

The meeting concluded and we broke for snack boxes and tea in plastic cups.

The whole meeting was a bizarre, pointless exhibition of spoken word, poetry reading, conflict resolution, theatre and mooching.

Later some co-workers told me why so many people turned up at our office the day before: amateur blackmail. Many offered not to ask inconvenient questions, or ask convenient ones, in exchange for some petty cash or freebies.

It was a complete violation of the purpose of AGMs. But like Shenoy said, small investors rarely get another chance to capitalise on their loyalty.

Mani Ratnam’s Guru is a thinly veiled biography of Dhirubhai Ambani. Like Ambani, Ratnam’s hero, Gurukant Desai, also starts from poverty and manipulates, grafts, and in many cases intimidates his way into running one of the biggest companies in the country. The AGM is such an integral part of the Ambani legend, that Ratnam features it prominently in his movie. Choosing, even, to finish the film with a shot of a stadium full of shareholders.

Today, says Deepak Shenoy, the Ambani-style AGM is slowly petering out. A small group of front-benchers continue to wreak havoc during AGM season all over Mumbai but in most cases AGMs no longer matter. Institutional investors just pick up the phone and call up top management. Analysts get special sessions to discuss numbers. And media appearances and interviews are organised by PR companies.

“If you include TV channels, newspaper and websites there are some 31 or 32 media brands today handling business news in India,” says Govindraj Ethiraj. “This is probably one of the highest in the world.”

Saturated with so much information, many shareholders already know everything they need to.

For connoisseurs of Indian theatre, AGMs still offer good value. One share each in a handful of companies seems like a sound investment. In return you are guaranteed exclusive annual access to an artform in its twilight years. And snack boxes.

Tableeghi Jamaat in Pakistan

The Mohajirs in Pakistan

Celebrity isn’t just harmless fun – it’s the smiling face of the corporate machine

Our failure to understand the link between fame and big business made the rise of Trump inevitable

George Monbiot in The Guardian


‘It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living: her role is to exist in our minds’. Photograph: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Now that a reality TV star is preparing to become president of the United States, can we agree that celebrity culture is more than just harmless fun – that it might, in fact, be an essential component of the systems that govern our lives?
The rise of celebrity culture did not happen by itself. It has long been cultivated by advertisers, marketers and the media. And it has a function. The more distant and impersonal corporations become, the more they rely on other people’s faces to connect them to their customers.
Corporation means body; capital means head. But corporate capital has neither head nor body. It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours. It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living: her role is to exist in our minds. By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.

An obsession with celebrity does not lie quietly beside the other things we value; it takes their place. A study published in the journal Cyberpsychology reveals that an extraordinary shift appears to have taken place between 1997 and 2007 in the US. In 1997, the dominant values (as judged by an adult audience) expressed by the shows most popular among nine- to 11 year-olds were community feeling, followed by benevolence. Fame came 15th out of the 16 values tested. By 2007, when shows such as Hannah Montana prevailed, fame came first, followed by achievement, image, popularity and financial success. Community feeling had fallen to 11th, benevolence to 12th.

A paper in the International Journal of Cultural Studies found that, among the people it surveyed in the UK, those who follow celebrity gossip most closely are three times less likely than people interested in other forms of news to be involved in local organisations, and half as likely to volunteer. Virtual neighbours replace real ones.

The blander and more homogenised the product, the more distinctive the mask it needs to wear. This is why Iggy Pop was used to promote motor insurance and Benicio del Toro is used to sell Heineken. The role of such people is to suggest that there is something more exciting behind the logo than office blocks and spreadsheets. They transfer their edginess to the company they represent. As soon they take the cheque that buys their identity, they become as processed and meaningless as the item they are promoting.

The celebrities you see most often are the most lucrative products, extruded through a willing media by a marketing industry whose power no one seeks to check. This is why actors and models now receive such disproportionate attention, capturing much of the space once occupied by people with their own ideas: their expertise lies in channelling other people’s visions.

A database search by the anthropologist Grant McCracken reveals that in the US actors received 17% of the cultural attention accorded to famous people between 1900 and 1910: slightly less than physicists, chemists and biologists combined. Film directors received 6% and writers 11%. Between 1900 and 1950, actors had 24% of the coverage, and writers 9%. By 2010, actors accounted for 37% (over four times the attention natural scientists received), while the proportion allocated to both film directors and writers fell to 3%.

You don’t have to read or watch many interviews to see that the principal qualities now sought in a celebrity are vapidity, vacuity and physical beauty. They can be used as a blank screen on to which anything can be projected. With a few exceptions, those who have least to say are granted the greatest number of platforms on which to say it.

This helps to explain the mass delusion among young people that they have a reasonable chance of becoming famous. A survey of 16-year-olds in the UKrevealed that 54% of them intend to become celebrities.

As soon as celebrities forget their allotted role, the hounds of hell are let loose upon them. Lily Allen was the media’s darling when she was advertising John Lewis. Gary Lineker couldn’t put a foot wrong when he stuck to selling junk food to children. But when they expressed sympathy for refugees, they were torn to shreds. When you take the corporate shilling, you are supposed to stop thinking for yourself.

Celebrity has a second major role: as a weapon of mass distraction. The survey published in the IJCS I mentioned earlier also reveals that people who are the most interested in celebrity are the least engaged in politics, the least likely to protest and the least likely to vote. This appears to shatter the media’s frequent, self-justifying claim that celebrities connect us to public life.

The survey found that people fixated by celebrity watch the news on average as much as others do, but they appear to exist in a state of permanent diversion. If you want people to remain quiescent and unengaged, show them the faces of Taylor Swift, Shia LaBeouf and Cara Delevingne several times a day.

In Trump we see a perfect fusion of the two main uses of celebrity culture: corporate personification and mass distraction. His celebrity became a mask for his own chaotic, outsourced and unscrupulous business empire. His public image was the perfect inversion of everything he and his companies represent. As presenter of the US version of The Apprentice, this spoilt heir to humongous wealth became the face of enterprise and social mobility. During the presidential elections, his noisy persona distracted people from the intellectual void behind the mask, a void now filled by more lucid representatives of global capital.

Celebrities might inhabit your life, but they are not your friends. Regardless of the intentions of those on whom it is bequeathed, celebrity is the lieutenant of exploitation. Let’s turn our neighbours back into our neighbours, and turn our backs on those who impersonate them.

Some of Your Favourite Foods are probably Fake

Karishma Gander in The Independent




Fish, beef, and coffee are among the staple foods of many people’s diets – but they are also the most likely to be counterfeited, an expert has told The Independent.

US-based food writer Larry Olmsted spent four years investigating the world of falsely sold and packaged food, travelling across the world from Japan to South Africa. His results were compiled in his bestselling book Real Food, Fake Food.

“Seafood would be the worst category overall,” Olmsted told The Independent, with sushi at the top of the list. “When you order the priciest most desirable white fish, such as red snapper, grouper, and the like, most of the time you are just not going to get them. Species substitution, with a cheap fish swapped for a desirable one, is commonplace." Ground “lobster” in ravioli and caviar, he adds, are also prone to being faked.

“With the exception of the most expensive and elite sushi eateries that fly in their own fish, the failure rate of restaurants having at least one fake on the menu when tested approaches 100 per cent.”

Other foods that are easily counterfeited include extra virgin olive oil - with several heists in France and Italy in 2016 - higher-end cheeses and honey, while Japanese wagyu and Kobe beef are “plagued with fraud”.

Olmsted’s message is that if a food seems too good to be true in terms of price, it probably is.

As for drinks, ground coffee is widely subjected to adulteration, while “you can never tell what animal’s milk cheese is made from by looking at it, so cheap cow’s milk is sold as pricier goat or sheep milk cheese," he added.

Readers heading to restaurants are advised to beware of what he calls “menu hyperbole.”

"Beware of any adjectives that appear to add value, such as 'grass fed' or 'dry aged' beef, 'wild caught' fish, 'humanly raised' poultry and even 'organic'' as well as geographic claims like 'Alaskan' salmon," he said, as such terms can be vague and meaningless. As for supermarket packaging, he adds, buzzwords should be red flags, most notably: “natural,” “pure,” and “real".

The UK in particular has a manuka honey problem, he added, with one study showing that most brands shelves were not real, while similar issues were found in with substitution in premium goat and sheep cheeses.

But Olmsted stressed that he doesn’t want to frighten people. Not all food is fake. Ordering products close to their form – such as a whole lobster or fish – can prevent trickery.

“Scotch whisky is the single most reliable and protected foodstuff on earth," he said, adding that the PDO seal, which appears of food and drink including Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and Champagne, guarantees it is real.

“Ironically cheaper foods are usually more authentic - if you see a menu or store selling farmed salmon it will be true because there is no cheaper substitute. I recommend buying from producers, like a farmer or rancher you know."

“I don't want people to be scared to eat,” he added, “I want them to eat better and enjoy delicious food. Be adventurous, be hungry, but be informed.”

India's small businesses facing 'apocalypse' amid biggest financial experiment in history

Michael Safi in The Guardian



Down one of the hundreds of dusty lanes that make up Gandhi Nagar market, Delhi’s largest textile bazaar, the small factory where Neeraj Sharma produces girls’ jeans is quiet.

“Normally you couldn’t walk in here,” he says, ambling across the concrete shop floor, past dormant sowing machines and piles of unfinished denim.


Sharma estimates around 80% of his workforce have left Delhi for their villages in the past month. “It’s good that they left,” he adds. “Because of this demonetisation problem, there’s no work for us either.”

India’s vast informal economy has been reeling since 8 November, the morning after India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced the sudden voiding of the country’s two most-used cash bills.

Your money's no good: rupee note cancellation plunges India into panic


It is the largest-scale financial experiment in Indian history: gutting 14 trillion rupees – 86% of the currency in circulation – from the most cash-dependent major economy in the world.

More than a month on, India’s Reserve Bank has issued around 1.7 billion new notes, with less than one-third the value of what was removed. The sixth-largest economy in the world is running on 60% less currency than before. Lines outside banks continue to stretch, and India’s small business lobby says its members are facing an “apocalypse”. But Modi insists he isn’t done.

Initially intended to flush out the “black money” said to be hoarded by elites and criminals, the government now frames demonetisation as the first step in a “cashless” revolution to shift the billions of transactions undertaken each day in India online – and onto the radar of tax authorities.

This week, labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya announced it would soon be mandatory for employers to pay their staff into bank accounts, a hugely ambitious step in a country where as many as 90% of workers are paid in cash.

Already struggling, businessmen such as Sharma are dreading the prospect of more enforced digital migration.


“How do you think I can pay the workers with a cheque if they don’t have a bank account?” he asks, in a tiny office thick with incense smoke. “And it takes three days to clear a cheque. What will they eat during those days?” 

His reasons are not just altruistic. Apart from potentially raising his tax bill – in a country where just 1% pay income tax – paying salaries electronically would mean giving staff Delhi’s mandated minimum wage, currently 9,724 rupees (£114) per month for unskilled workers.
“Right now no one pays the minimum wage that the government decides,” Sharma says. “It will only make things expensive: we will charge the customer.”

Outside his workers’ earshot, he adds: “If someone is doing the work of Rs.2000, why should we pay them Rs.15,000?”

But workers too are wary of the big push online. Tens of millions of Indians have been given zero-deposit bank accounts in the past two years under a government scheme to boost financial inclusion. But even after demonetisation prompted a rush of new deposits, 23% of the accounts still lie empty.

Asha Devi sits spread-legged on the Sharma factory’s floor, using fine scissors to cut loose threads from piles of jeans. A migrant labourer from Bihar state, she has a bank account, but has not been able to access her money since early November.

“I’ve been standing in [bank] queues from 7am until 5.30 in the evening,” she says. “I still cannot withdraw money, and I lose a day of work each time.”

The experience has heightened her scepticism about being paid online. “I am a daily wage worker and I’m not sure if I’ll have a job tomorrow,” she says. “If I get [the cash] in hand, I know I have the money.”

Cash has a cold, hard certainty that still matters to itinerant workers. “There are many factory owners who will make these daily wage workers into fools,” Devi adds. “They’ll tell them they have deposited the money when they haven’t.”

“In theory, it’s a great idea to actually ensure that workers actually get the wage they’ve been promised,” says Aparna, the president of the Indian Federation of Trade Unions, who like many Indians uses only one name.

“The downside is: we can’t do it. It’s a bit like say the government has announced the end to all poverty by tomorrow. It’s not taking into account any of the obvious constraints that even a child in India could see.”

Around one in three Indians still don’t have bank accounts, she says, many of them put off by the need to navigate banking bureaucracy. “For people who don’t have matching identity cards – say, if somebody made a mistake typing their name – then it’s a nightmare,” she says.

Nagendra Sarkar, another of Sharma’s employees, has been trying to open an account in Delhi, but keeps running into an obstacle: he has no fixed address. “The bank people are asking for papers to prove that it’s my account,” he says.

It is one of many points at which the digital salary plan, and the entire “cashless” vision, butt up against the stubborn reality of Indian working life.

“Take an example of rickshaw puller who transfers goods from my shop to the factories,” says Pyarlal, a lace factory owner in Gandhi Nagar.

“For one trip I pay him 100 rupees. Does the government expect me to give him a cheque? I mean, how do I pay him?”

Such a major reform, even one that might benefit workers, can’t be enforced overnight, Aparna says. “You have to do it gradually, let the system be put in place, create the infrastructure first.”

Mihir Sharma, a senior fellow at the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, agrees. “The law might well be passed,” he says. “But it would likely be widely ignored, which is the fare of most labour regulation in India.”

Digital payments might be novel, but the ambitious plan is “an old Indian pathology”, he says. “The belief that if you legislate something, it happens.”