TIL Desk/Business/New Delhi-Pulled-down shutters and long queues outside ATMs had been a common sight in the last two weeks. But as a task force of around 50,000 workers have begun working round the clock and recalibrating the ATM networks, the number of ATMs that are up and functioning has steadily increased from 3,000 on last Tuesday to approximately 75,000 by end of the day. Last week, a task force was set up under Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor S S Mundra with the idea to increase the speed of recalibration of the ATM network.
This task force includes members of the RBI, the ATM manufacturing company, cash logistics firms, banks etc to ensure that these ATMs can be up and running soon. Players explain that the employees working on this mammoth task of recalibrating 202,801 ATMs (data till August 2016) is around 50,000. This includes around 2,500 engineers and about 47,000 employees of the cash management firms. And the total number of cash vans available for this task is only 8,800.
To make matters more challenging, at any given point of time it takes about 5 employees to come together to recalibrate an ATM and coordinating this to fix up the vast ATM network had become a huge challenge. But now with the coming of the task force, there are about 28 employees, one representative from every organisation in the process, who are sitting in one control room stationed out of Mumbai and monitoring the situation closely. “The resources that the industry has are limited and we suddenly can’t hire people or increase the number of cash vans,” explains Rituraj Sinha, President, Cash Logistics Association of India.
