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    View: How internet has created its own form of complementary commerce

    The transactional dynamics of such wide and varied decentralised, synergetic communities could hold many helpful lessons of livelihood during these disruptive pandemic times.

    Synopsis

    Cashless commerce has thrived in parts of the world ever since the age-old barter system of trade — I’ll give you a sheaf of maize if you lend me your plough — and was gradually replaced by more commensurable units of exchange based on the labour invested in them.

    Like the ebb and flow of ocean tides, the human sea of migrant labourers who had surged out of cities to return home after their incomes were jeopardised by the first lockdown, and who eddied back in search of urban employment, once again poured out of metros as new curfews and restrictions were imposed in a desperate bid to check the alarming spread of Covid-19.The second wave of exodus has once again sparked the debate of lives vs livelihoods,
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    The Economic Times