JAIPUR: Over 200 construction labourers with their tools stand and wait for work near the police station at Sodala on Wednesday morning. As the discussion turns to the “note-bandi” – the ban on old notes – opinions are divided.Uparlal Bhagwan, about 40 years old, seems to have had an early morning tipple – he smells of alcohol although it is only 9 o’clock in the morning. “Modi has done a good thing indeed. We poor people are used to hard times, now at least even those who are rich will begin to line up and face some tough times. Look at me, you people can think of getting married, getting your children married. I live a bachelor boy, condemned to it by poverty. Now, even the rich will see some suffering, as all the money they have stashed goes useless. We will all be the same,” he says. Other labourers around him, however, do not agree.Phool Babu, from Bihar, says, “Where will we go if things continue like this? In the past week, I’ve found work only for two days. I have rent to pay and I have to send money home too. If I cannot make ends meet, what will I do?” Babu has been living in Jaipur for about eight years. The work has been reasonably steady, he says, until even those who engage workers have begun to feel the pinch of the demonetization drive.Sagar Kumar, a resident of Nahargarh, says, “It’s not as if we need Rs 2,000 notes. The contractor might pay four of us Rs 2,000 and expect us to divide the sum among us, but where will we go for change? The small notes are hard to come by. I have no bank account. I have never had any need for one – what I earn is spent on the family. I am the sole earning member in my family and there are five of us. What use do I have for a bank? What I earn, I spend. But things are hard now. Can we just write to the PM and ask him to restore the old notes? Why must the government spend money on printing new notes? The old ones were fine.”Many workers complained that they had no ration cards. “Wheat flour was available earlier at Rs 21 a kg, but now have to spend Rs 25 a kg. We earn just about Rs 400 a day, on a good day. There are days when we just come and stand about here and return empty-handed, having got no work at all. We have families to feed,” Kumar said, adding that the government should pay heed to providing rations for the poor instead of making it harder to get work.Bhagwan said, “The government tells us that we can only get our rations if we first have a toilet in the house. They should first come and see how we live – we do not have concrete houses, we have nothing to eat. Is a toilet more important?” Bhagwan is drunk, but what he says strikes a chord with the other workers gathered around him.Young and sprightly Abhimanyu from Bihar too is a worried man: “If we can only manage about 15 days of work a month, how will we send any money home?”At least four of the over 20 labourers that this reporter spoke with seemed inebriated early in the day, indicating a high level of dependence on alcohol or drugs.Ashok Khandelwal, Supreme Court commissioner for the Right to Food, for the state of Rajasthan, said, “The poor are restive, seeking some action. Demonetization has come as dramatic political action but there is little understanding of what good might come of it or how long the suffering will continue. It seems to me that seeking a monetary solution for a political problem – corruption – could be enormously damaging.”