RBI blamed for acute currency crisis in nationalized banks in Malda

SOUMYA DE SARKAR, 

MALDA, EOI, 4 Dec 2016: The nationalized banks in the district are reeling under acute fund crunch owing to poor supply of currencies by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as learnt from the senior bank officials. The crisis is now so acute that consumers may not be able to withdraw the minimum money either from the bank counters or through the ATMs from Monday.

It may be mentioned that almost all ATMs of the State Bank of India (SBI) in the district remained dry for last 36 hours. Other nationalized and private banks with their limited number of ATMs tried supplying money to the consumers but that was much below the demand.

“We anticipate that the situation would worsen further from Monday as we are left with virtually exhausted stock of currencies. If the currencies are not supplied in next 48 hours, we would be unable to offer money to our consumers,” said a managerial cadre employee of SBI on strict condition of anonymity today.

He said, “Since demonetization was declared, the RBI supplied us Rs 11 crore and Rs 4 crore at a gap of 10 days while our indent was Rs 20 crore and Rs 15 crore respectively. The last supply of currencies amounting Rs 4 crore was made about 10 days back.”

With the beginning of new months the employees of different sectors started knocking the doors of the bank to withdraw their salary. As the demand is huge and the supply of currencies from RBI is too low, the bank employees are anticipating harassments by the people demanding their own money.

An SBI official also explained as to why they had to stop the ATM service from last 36 hours. “We are actually helpless. Within four days of demonetization our bank first started dispensing currencies through ATMs. Most of the other banks kept their ATM services suspended then. Naturally, the consumers of other banks started using our ATMs with more than one debit cards issued by the other banks. As a result the stock of our ATMs got exhausted quickly and we were being blamed by people despite our services. Now, when our ATMs are closed, other banks are being forced to open their ATMs,” he said.

Meanwhile, the district magistrate Sharad Dwivedi met senior bank officials on Saturday to take stock of the situation. “We requested the bank officials to serve people with their best possible strength,” Dwivedi said today.