Consecutive bank holidays to stall Rs 1,200 crore cheques daily

LUCKNOW: Plan your banking transactions well in advance as for the nine days between March 28 and April 5, banks will work full-day on just two days— March 30 and 31. The rest of the days will see banks remaining closed on account of various holidays and Sundays.
While Ramnavmi holiday is on March 28, March 29 is a Sunday. On April 1, banks will remain closed for customer dealing due to annual closing.April 2 is Mahavir Jayanti and April 3 is Good Friday, so on both days banks will remain closed. After a long gap, they would open only for half working day on Saturday, April 4, followed by a Sunday on March 5.
For banks, coming together of so many consecutive off days is rare and would significantly impact clearance of a large number of cheques, loan procedures and other banking operations. Experts claim that due to several offs in a row, cheques’ clearance worth around Rs 1200 crore would get stuck on a daily basis in Lucknow itself. “The impact would be felt across the state as cheques worth more than Rs 45000 crore would get stalled daily,” said an official from the clearing department of a leading government bank.
The biggest challenge would be ensuring smooth cash dispensing across the 800 ATMs in the city during the off period. Though most banks have outsourced the refilling part of their ATMs, the alert to refill them and trace actual status of amount left inside the ATM machine is processed by the banks’ server. During offs, some problems are often experienced at the coordination end of the bank and the outsourced agency.
The ATM incharge of a popular private bank said, “We ensure that ATMs are refilled even on off days. But when so many consecutive offs occur, attendance is bound to decrease even at the agencies’ front. This affects regular refilling of ATMs.” He said that it is often because of panic among people that consecutive offs result in sudden surge in demand and depleting of ATM cash reserves.
It is estimated that the daily average withdrawal from an ATM varies between Rs 10-15 lakh. During continuous offs, banks mostly try to replenish ATMs in full capacity to prevent their exhaustion. “We normally have records of footfall at each ATM centre. If we expect 100 withdrawals per day, we tend to refill ATMs with double the required amount during offs,” said a bank official.
As a preventive measure, banks mostly give prior permission to the replenishment agencies to draw cash from their safekeeping vault during emergency to refill ATMs without any delay. Some also increase the frequency of reloading the ATMs during continuous offs.