Jaitley also said that around 22,500 ATMs were being recalibrated on Thursday to be able to dispense Rs 2000, Rs 500 and Rs 100 currency notes. “Since these people will be back the next morning, the queue will be even longer when we reopen”, the manager said.
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“This is our first time in Goa and we read the safest way was to use ATMs but they have had no cash in them since last Thursday”.
Most ATMs had boards of “No cash” and “Out of cash” on them.
To ensure sufficient availability of notes in ATMs, Das said cash is being supplied in every way possible and the government and Reserve Bank had made a contingency plan.
Nearly all nationalised banks in the district opened branches and Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) after Mr. Chidambaram took the initiative during his 2009-2014 tenure. An official of a large retail store said that the daily turnover had fallen by over 50% due to the curbs on cash.
“Who’s got them? They are mainly in the hands of drug lords, human traffickers, and tax evaders”, Mr Martin had said, answering his own question while quoting from influential USA economist Kenneth Rogoff’s recently released book “The Curse of Cash”. But it may not be before one week that half of the over 2 lakh cash vending ATMs to be online. The move, announced with only a day’s notice, was an effort to crack down on corruption and tax evasion. The situation is unlikely to change till the Rs 500 denomination notes arrive, a manager at Union Bank branch told The Assam Tribune.
The RBI’s clarification comes as massive number of people have been thronging branches across the country to exchange the scrapped 1,000 and 500 rupee notes.
Officials of banks across Calcutta said they had been consistently receiving less than a third of the cash required to match the expected volume of withdrawals. “I have only Rs 30 in my wallet”.
The prime minister last week outlawed larger denomination notes in what he called a drive to rein in corruption and a shadow economy. After a week, today, I am left with nothing. I appreciate your determination to do so, but you should have been more careful and aware of the consequences that would ensue.
Standing in an ATM queue in Lajpat Nagar, the 25-year-old said: “It has been two hours already”. The next time the government takes a decision like this, I hope that they think carefully and then act accordingly.
The timing of the move is critical. “The maximum area will be progressively calibrated.If we receive any report on any shortage of cash, we are quickly sending cash there”, he said.
But now the country has run out of change and that there is no cash in the ATMs, people are literally struggling to survive. “No country has done this kind of shock therapy”.
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“I have been in Goa since Diwali and took out 30,000 rupees (£356) – in three sets of 10,000 rupees (£118) ATM transactions – which is the maximum allowed for foreign debit cards before the notes were declared invalid”.
