Folio 07 · about 3 minutes

What Survives

The neighbourhood shop's udhaar notebook still runs on the bahi's oldest principle: credit given to a known name, written against that name and settled later. UPI now moves the money, and apps have moved the notebook onto a phone.

Is the udhaar book the new bahi?

In practice, yes. When TechCrunch reported in 2020 on the digital-ledger app Khatabook, it described most of India's small merchants as still keeping their accounts in long notebooks. Khatabook said that more than 8 million merchants in over 700 districts were using the app.¹ Those are the company's own figures, but the problem it described is familiar to anyone who has stood at a kirana counter. There is a notebook, a page for each regular customer, and a running total that is paid off at the end of the month.

The vocabulary has barely moved. The two halves of Kochar's family bahi were jama and udhaar.² Digital ledgers mostly keep both words and the logic that goes with them: a named customer, a balance and a settlement date. What the screen loses is the fold, the red cloth and the swastika on the first page. What it adds is a reminder sent by text message.

What changed with UPI?

The movement of money changed completely. In the 2025–26 financial year UPI processed about 24,162 crore transactions, worth about ₹314 lakh crore. In March 2026 alone it handled a record 2,264 crore transactions.³ Payments from people to merchants made up 63 per cent of the volume, and 86 per cent of those merchant payments were for less than ₹500.³ Those are kirana-sized sums.

A payment system settles a debt; it does not decide who deserves credit. The udhaar book records a judgment about a person, and that judgment is still made the old way, by a shopkeeper who knows the family. UPI's figures measure the payments, not the trust that comes before them.

Chopda pujan in 2026

The ritual has adapted rather than disappeared. On Sunday, 8 November 2026, business families will consecrate their new chopda for the year.⁴ Those who keep their accounts on computers will draw a swastika, Om and Shubh-Labh on the laptop instead.⁴ At the national level the red bahi has become a budget-day symbol, now wrapped around a tablet.⁵ The book has turned into a gesture, but the gesture still means the same thing: a new year of accounts, begun under a blessing.

What did the old system know about trust?

Read across these chapters, the indigenous system rested on a few ideas that modern finance keeps rediscovering.

• Reputation is collateral. Credit moved without security inside networks where each party's standing was known.⁶ Credit scores and merchant ratings are attempts to rebuild that knowledge for strangers.
• Disputes are cheapest when settled by people who understand the trade. The shroffs' associations and temple councils did this quickly and in large volume.⁷ Online marketplaces now run their own dispute systems for the same reason.
• Risk has a price that depends on distance and on whom you are dealing with. Tavernier's remittance rates rose with distance.⁸ The shah-jog hundi assigned the risk of fraud to a named person.⁹
• Someone must own the record. The bahi was written by the firm, in the firm's script, and kept under lock. Who owns the ledger is now a question about platforms and data.

None of this makes the old system a model to copy. It excluded people as well as including them, and its trust stopped at the edge of the network. It does show that much of what fintech offers as new, from ledgers on phones to reputation-based credit, has a long history in the bazaar.

More from the shop floor

Sahil's own work on the everyday economy picks up where this history ends:

• The Kirana Observatory, a playable 32-encounter model of a fictional Delhi shop with a balanced double-entry ledger.¹⁰
• The Kirana Laboratory, a field notebook on trust, inventory and behaviour in neighbourhood retail.
• Earlier writing on LinkedIn, as listed in the Sahilverse index:¹¹ India's informal microeconomy, observing India's economy from the shop floor, and micro-liquidity and the ₹10 problem.

To go back to the beginning, start with the book wrapped in red.