ATMs may take almost a month to become fully functional

NEW DELHI: If the serpentine queues at ATMs in the last two days were not enough, here’s some more bad news. It will take at least a couple of weeks before the machines start spouting the new `2,000 notes.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday said ATMs are yet to be “recalibrated” for dispensing the newly minted notes, and the exercise would take two to three weeks. “Secrecy couldn’t have been maintained if we had recalibrated the ATMs earlier...It is a massive exercise that has already been launched,” Jaitley said, adding that the government was monitoring the situation round the clock.

TheATMsarecurrentlydispensing only `100 notes. Cash logistics agencies responsible for refilling the machines said they haven’t been entrusted with the new `500 and `2,000 notes until now.

Government sources said that the note-producing exercise was taking more time than initially anticipated. They said though most currency in circulation was `500 notes, very few of the kind had been minted so far. “More will be minted eventually, but logistical reasons have forced us to limit the number of `500 notes for now,” an official told HT.

As the new notes are of different denominations and sizes, the software that helps the ATM count and dispense the currency notes has to be reconfigured.

Each ATM has four cassettes. In most places, especially cities, two of these cassettes are used to hold notes in the `500 denomination while the remaining two are split between `1,000 and `100. Now, all these machines would have to be reconfigured to give out `2,000 as well as different-sized `500 notes, said an official who manages cash logistics services for several banks across DelhiNCR. This would require an engineer to physically dismantle the ATM and reconfigure its software over three to four hours, he added.

In other words, a single engineer can fix between two to three ATMs in a day, depending on how far they are located from each other. There are 2.2 lakh ATMs across the country. Hence, if 10,000 engineers are pressed into service, it would take at least 10 days to complete the job. Simply put, long queues at ATMs are not going away anytime soon.