Here’s why most ATMs are out of cash and would continue to be so till a few days

If you are worried about ‘cashlessness’ in mid month, know that MD of SIS Prosegur, a cash logistics firm, that services roughly 25,000 ATMs across the country is no exception. Rituraj Sinha who is also president of Cash Logistics Association of India said he had no idea about this even minute before the announcement was made.

The core team of SIS Prosegur assembled over a video meet at 11pm on 8th November, the day Modi made the announcement of demonetization. After their meeting till 2 AM at night, 25 additional cash vans 35 more security guards (in addition to 550) and an equal number of trainees were brought to the headquarters by Wednesday morning.

The first job was to evacuate the old notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1000. Every ATM has four money cassettes or slots, two for Rs 500, one for Rs 1,000 notes and one for Rs 100 notes. Each cassette can hold up to 3,000 notes, which means over Rs 2.5 lakh in Rs 100 notes in a single ATM. Forget a big city like Delhi, that amount is paltry even for a tier-II town. No wonder, ATMs are running out of cash within a few hours.
The employees at SIS Prosegur are having sleepless nights. By the time a cash van loads an ATM and moves to another location, the first ATM is pretty much empty. What has also aggravated the problem is the no availability of Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes. And it will take some more time before users can withdraw the new currency because the ATM machine cassettes are yet to be configured for the new notes (which are of a different size).