Hundreds throng petrol bunks for cash in Bengaluru

Bengaluru: With the Union government allowing people to draw money at fuel stations using their debit cards, hundreds descended on them on Friday. But customers complained that most fuel stations refused to dispense upto  Rs 2,000  saying they were out of cash too.

One fuel station owner admitted that although stations with SBI swipe machines had been directed to issue upto Rs 2,000 to people , most were not able to.
“Only a  few station owners followed the orders,”  he said Its believed that Saturday could see all  fuel stations with swipe machines of private banks also issuing upto Rs 2,000 a person.

“All the city fuel stations have POS machines to engage in debit card/ credit card transactions. But the problem is they are short of cash. Till the RBI releases enough number of Rs 100 denomination notes, the problem will continue. The city is also facing a huge shortage of Rs 50 notes and coin distribution has also almost stopped. This has led to a big crisis,” said one station owner.

Meanwhile, some customers claimed  they were being forced to buy fuel for at least Rs 500 at the stations. “They are refusing to give petrol for Rs 100 or Rs 200 saying they have no change,”  complained Mr. Shanthanu Gowda, a marketing professional.

Besides  fuel stations, malls with POS machines could also be asked  to distribute cash to customers by swiping their cards, claim some private bank officials. “Most malls have POS machines. So they too will be directed to issue change to the general public against their cards,”  said a bank officer.

Still long queues at ATMs

While long queues continued outside ATMs and banks on Friday, the situation appears to be gradually easing in several parts of the city. Many reported that the waiting time to collect or exchange cash from bank branches was  around one hour in the morning as against a couple. 

 “I was waiting since 10 am and got to do the exchange by 11.10 am. I was the 41st person in the queue,’ said Ashalaltha Lakshman, a teacher from Malleswaram. “To avoid the rush and wait I didn’t try to go to a bank till today and  applied for half-day leave from work to be here,” she said.

People also seemed happier using ATMs. “I was  fourth in the line at a Canara Bank ATM in Madiwala and had four cards to collect my money. It was five minutes work,” said a happy customer, Naveen Prasad. Coming to the rescue of people several banks have now installed cash deposit machines to speed up the process.

An ICICI bank customer said it took him just three minutes to deposit Rs 10,000 through the machine at the bank’s Ashok Nagar branch. “If banks had introduced these machines from day one, they could have avoided the long queues,” said the customer, also happy to note that banks were now refilling their ATMs twice a day. “With this the cash crunch problem should  be solved in a couple of days,” he added optimistically.