Banks step back as you draw out!

Banks are not geared up for such a steep rise in volumes.
Confess! Haven’t you all been going to bank ATMs regularly during the past few months? The sharp rise in the number of transactions at ATMs in the country seems to prove it.
You probably wanted to check out if it was really true that you could draw your money from any ATM. And barring an occasional hiccup, you got the money. And you were able to check out your bank balance on a daily basis – following up every credit that came into your account and carefully monitoring the debit of every amount from the account. Just admit it.
Data from the National Payments Corporation show that the number of balance enquiries at the ATMs went up 14 fold and the number of cash withdrawals rose ten-fold even as the number of ATMs themselves doubled during the past one-and-a-half years (see table).
It takes an average of 200 hits or withdrawals from an ATM a day for the investments to break even. Going by the usage patterns a little over a year ago, it seemed as though that was not happening.

But ever since April 1 of this year, when the RBI threw open access to all ATMs for all bank customers, ATM usage has sky-rocketed. Average hits every day was about 1,100 (about 800 for cash withdrawals alone) for August spread across 42,375 ATMs in the country.
If you assume that each transaction takes about a minute, what you have is a situation where ATMs were probably occupied for about 19 hours every day! Imagine the logistical nightmare of having to load up the cash every few hours as ATMs dry out. If one goes by these statistics, it seems that bankers didn’t get any respite last month.
Clearly, banks were not geared up for such a steep rise in volumes. And, therefore, the chorus to limit the number of free transactions to just five in another bank’s ATM.
Better stay away from ATMs for a while.