News from Sweden, India and the Netherlands

SWEDEN – Sweden moving towards cashless economy

The krona (plural: kronor) has been the currency of Sweden since 1873.

STOCKHOLM – … In most Swedish cities, public buses don’t accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices – which make money on electronic transactions – have stopped handling cash altogether.

“There are towns where it isn’t at all possible anymore to enter a bank and use cash,” complains Curt Persson, chairman of Sweden’s National Pensioners’ Organization.

He says that’s a problem for elderly people in rural areas who don’t have credit cards or don’t know how to use them to withdraw cash.

The decline of cash is noticeable even in houses of worship, like the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, where Vicar Johan Tyrberg recently installed a card reader to make it easier for worshippers to make offerings.

“People came up to me several times and said they didn’t have cash but would still like to donate money,” Tyrberg says.

Bills and coins represent only 3 percent of Sweden’s economy, compared to an average of 9 percent in the eurozone and 7 percent in the U.S., according to the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella organization for the world’s central banks.
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Internet startups in Sweden and elsewhere are now hard at work developing payment and banking services for smartphones.

Swedish company iZettel has developed a device for small traders, similar to Square in the U.S., that plugs into the back of an iPhone to make it work like a credit card terminal. Sweden’s biggest banks are expected to launch a joint service later this year that allows customers to transfer money between each other’s accounts in real-time with their cell phones.

Most experts don’t expect cash to disappear anytime soon, but that its proportion of the economy will continue to decline as such payment options become available. Before retiring as deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank, Lars Nyberg said last year that cash will survive “like the crocodile, even though it may be forced to see its habitat gradually cut back.”

Andrea Wramfelt, whose bowling alley in the southern city of Landskrona stopped accepting cash in 2010, makes a bolder prediction: She believes coins and notes will cease to exist in Sweden within 20 years.

“Personally I think this is what people should expect in the future,” she says.

But there are pockets of resistance. Hanna Celik, whose family owns a newspaper kiosk in a Stockholm shopping mall, says the digital economy is all about banks seeking bigger earnings.

Celik says he gets charged about 5 Swedish kronor ($0.80) for every credit card transaction, and a law passed by the Swedish Parliament prevents him from passing on that charge to consumers.

“That stinks,” he says. “For them (the banks), this is a very good way to earn a lot of money, that’s what it’s all about. They make huge profits.”

INDIA – 15,000 die each year crossing rail tracks in India

About 15,000 people die every year trying to cross the tracks of India’s mammoth rail network, a “massacre’’ that a government committee said was being ignored by railway authorities.

The safety panel said new bridges and overpasses were urgently needed, but it noted previous recommendations to make the world’s fourth largest railway system safer had been ignored. Its report noted that railway authorities were unwilling to view the deaths of people hit by trains while crossing the tracks as train accidents.

Most of the deaths occur at unmanned railroad crossings, said the report released [at the end of February]. About 6,000 people die on Mumbai’s crowded suburban rail network alone.

Another 1,000 people die when they fall from crowded [train cars], when trains collide or coaches derail, it said.

India’s 40,000 miles of railway track cut through some of the most densely populated cities, flanked by shanty towns, in the nation of 1.2 billion people.

Railway experts say stopping pedestrians from crossing the tracks in congested areas would be virtually impossible.

“The situation is exceptionally dangerous in Mumbai where four or five tracks, or more, lie parallel and people living in slums on either side have no choice but to walk across the tracks,’’ said I.M.S. Rana, a railway expert.

The High Level Safety Review Committee was set up by the government in September after a spate of train accidents. Around 20 million people in India travel by train each day.

The report called on the government to urgently replace all railroad crossings with bridges or overpasses at an estimated cost of 500 billion rupees ($10 billion) over the next five years.

“No civilized society can accept such a massacre on their railway system,’’ the report said, referring to the crossing deaths.

“Reluctance of the Indian railways to own up to the casualties, which do not fall under the purview of accidents, but are nevertheless accidents on account of trains, can by no means be ignored,’’ the report said.

The panel was especially scathing about the large number of deaths in Mumbai and recommended that the “grim situation on Mumbai’s suburban system has to be tackled on a war-footing.’’

“Trespassing occurs because of lack of barricading, fencing, lack of adequate number of pedestrian overbridges and lack of facilities such as sufficient number of platforms, escalators, elevators for the disabled apart from insufficient train services. These are the main reasons for the heavy human death toll,’’ the report said.

NETHERLANDS – ICC finds Congo warlord guilty of using child soldiers in first verdict

[NOTE: The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an independent international organization. It is not part of the United Nations system. Its seat is at The Hague in the Netherlands. The Court’s expenses are funded primarily by States Parties.]

Congolese warlard Thomas Lubanga (REUTERS)

Thomas Lubanga, 51, became the first person to be found guilty by the world’s war crimes and crimes against humanity court, six years after he was arrested.