VIJAYAWADA: The city is once again in the grip of a financial crisis with a majority of the ATMs here having no cash to dispense. Banks too are at the risk of running out of cash. Despite the situation having been precarious for over a month, no concrete steps have been taken to tide over the problem. Officials of an Andhra Bank branch here said their head office had allocated `120 crore to branches across the state. The Zonal Manager of Andhra Bank explained, “We are feeding ATMs with cash every day, but due to heavy withdrawals, they run dry the next day. People are asking for money at all the branches and we somehow arrange for it. In the rare case that we can’t, we ask them to come back the next day. There is cash shortage across the State.”
Some banks, however, are not allowing customers withdraw over `10,000 due to cash crunch. “It feels like as though the ghosts of demonetisation have come to haunt people again,” a city resident said pointing at an ATM sporting a no cash board.“These days are quite bad. To withdraw `20,000, at times customers have to wait until there is a deposit of `10,000 — that is half the amount. If there are many customers who want to withdraw bulk amounts, we ask them to come back later,” a senior employee told TNIE.
When asked about the dearth of cash in ATMs, bankers claimed the problem would be solved in a few days. Almost all ATMs in the city are dry by afternoon and a majority are not refilling them for the rest of the day. There are more than 300 ATMs in Vijayawada and almost all of them are dry.
V Nageswara Rao, a cloth merchant, said the cash crunch was adversely affecting his business. “I wanted to withdraw `30,000 to pay a supplier. I tried to withdraw cash from ATM, but almost all are empty. There are restrictions on card to card transfers, so I couldn’t do that either. I ended up standing in queue at a bank and withdrew only `15,000. In case there is an emergency, what can be done?”District officials including Collector B Lakshmikantham are not concerned about the situation. Despite the Collector having written to banks asking for more cash to be dispensed, little has been done.