Modi's story of beggar using swipe machine was promotional video made by Hyderabad Co
Hyderabad: Just a few days back Prime Minister Narendra Modi had talked about a beggar using a PoS (point to scale) machine, while promoting his vision of a cashless society at the Moradabad ‘Parivartan Rally’. While Modi said he wasn’t sure of the authenticity of the story, it turns out that the video was made by a tech company to promote digitalisation.
According to a report in The Indian Express, the video was made by Numero Graphics Solution Private Limited, a Hyderabad-based data processing and visualisation company in November 2013 and was posted in YouTube on 16th January 2014.
Kulpreet Kaur, co-founder of Numero Graphics Solutions said that this was one of the “several such creative videos” that the company shot to promote technology. “It is a promotional video that we made. We gave the beggar that swipe machine to shoot for the video,” she said.
“My colleague and I started Numero Uno in March 2013 and wanted to promote our company with creative videos. Haven’t we all seen beggars at traffic junctions — how people want to give them something and end up rummaging through their wallets with no small change? As a creative solutions team, we decided to make a video of a beggar seeking alms using a PoS machine to overcome the problem of small change. Of course, then we had no idea about demonetisation or this push for a cashless economy. We planned to shoot this video on a mobile phone at the Jubilee Hills traffic signal,” she added.
Kaur and her colleague found a beggar from the Sai Baba temple in Banjara hills, where beggars in Hyderabad gather every Thursday. He agreed to do the role at a small fee. They gave him the swipe machine and instructed him on how to carry out his role.
“He did exactly what we told him, and my colleague shot the video on his mobile phone. We started recording when the signal turned red, and it was over before it turned green.
“After returning our swipe machine, the beggar went his way.”
The beggar was nowhere to be seen, neither at the Jubilee Hills traffic junction nor at the Sai Baba temple when The Indian Express went looking for him.
The video went viral ever since the government started promoting its vision of a cashless economy.
