Man's salary reduced by half. Lower incomes slashed amid India's corruption crackdown

Imagine your salary suddenly being cut in half, with no prior warning. How would you cope?

And if it did happen, wouldn't you get angry and protest, or do something about it?

Sarvesh Kumar is a shy young man, just 22 years old. He's wearing a dirty grey shirt and trousers, a self-fashioned uniform of sorts. He seems almost shrunken. His shoulders are a bit hunched, his head sunken into his torso as he sits in his auto-rickshaw, a three-wheeler taxi that is common on the streets of New Delhi.

"So, your income just got halved?" I ask.

"Yup," he says. We are chatting in colloquial Hindi. "I used to make 1,000 rupees a day. Now I can barely make 500 rupees," he says.

"Ever since the government banned the old currency notes, I'm struggling to get rides."

Sarvesh poses by his auto rickshaw.

Sarvesh is referring to a surprise announcement by India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi on primetime TV on Tuesday, November 8.

Modi told the nation he was discontinuing 500 and 1,000 rupee notes: the two largest denomination notes, and worth some 80% of the total cash in circulation.

'Black money' crackdown

One of the main reasons he cited was to crack down on rich Indians who had stockpiled cash -- 'black money', as it's called here -- and avoided paying taxes.

Now, overnight, those cash hordes could be rendered worthless.

Cash has been hard to come by in New Delhi in the last week. The government has issued new 500 and 2,000 rupee notes, but one needs to queue up at an ATM or bank to get them. People I've spoken to in these queues have waited for hours, sometimes in vain. Many ATMs are broken.