Opening after three back to back holidays, the banks saw a huge rush of people on Tuesday. Short of cash, the banks of the state capital struggled to provide cash to the people. People started lining up outside the banks even before they opened on the day.
They were in for disappointment when banks either imposed an arbitrary upper limit setup by themselves on withdrawals or flatly refused to honour the cash withdrawal requests of customers.
The ATM network of the city also failed to provide any succor to the hapless customers as almost all these machines were without cash till afternoon. Some of the ATMs however started dispensing cash in afternoon.
“I could manage to withdraw only Rs 4000 today even after waiting for more than an hour in queue. Today is 45th day of the demonetisation decision of the government and if the government is not able to provide sufficient cash to the banks even now than it is a serious issue,’’ said a person coming out of Punjab National Bank (PNB) located on Raipur road.
The Deputy Manager of State Bank of India (SBI), Hari Om Rekhi said that the banks are forced to provide less cash than allowed to the customers due to acute shortage of cash. He said that the SBI, Dehradun has sent an indent to the RBI to send more cash.
The manager of district lead bank, G S Rana said that more than 90 percent ATMs of the district are now recalibrated to dispense new currency notes.
There are 749 ATMs in the district and despite being recalibrated more than sixty percent of them were not dispensing cash on Tuesday.