Lamka, February 07 2009: Against the back drop of parents struggling to meet educational institutions deadline for admission, the old familiar riddle they have to cope with in the cash-sort banks here has threatened to battered their chances, forcing many parents to press the panic button and beg for their wards to be taken at any cost.

"Initially the long queue at the bank counters were my only concern, but that's petty, they now runs out of cash", said a Grade-IV die-in-harness employed widow.

Her wait for three days to draw the cash she needed badly for her ward's admission went in vain, simply because the State Bank of India did not have enough cash to pay her.

"We are not an authorized chest branch.

We have a very limited disposal of cash here and when the UBI fails to meet our demand we are helpless," explained an UBI official.

The UBI is the sole currency chest of the RBI here and any cash transaction comes through the bank.

With more than forty three thousand customer with a core banking facility, the scale III SBI branch here is struggling to meet the cash needed for its daily transaction of an average Rs 80 lakhs.

Restricted by the paltry presence of banking facilities, most of its inhabitants and employees in the public and private sectors turns to the State Bank of India due to its ATM and core banking facilities, though at times the workforce lost their cool in dealing with its esteemed customers.

A spacious double decked and fully computerized multiple counters also added to the factors that allure more customers than their counterparts, but the lack of cash on its part has restrained them in serving their customers when they needed them most.

In a sense the SBI branch here has customers more than it can handle.

The claimed made by an insider that the branch despite being a scale III branch has handled a transaction worth of scale IV has confirmed the same.

Concerned over the frequent setback being faced by the cash starve SBI branch, and in this case the only State-of-the-art and dependable banking facility, the district administration has on its district consultative meeting on the last part of January recommended the facility of a currency chest for the local SBI branch to the Reserve Bank of India.

When queried, the Branch Manager said that he had bumped into a cash crisis a couple of times since assuming the charge in mid-November last year a regular one though, with a frequency of once a month.

Separate RBI currency chest seems the only way out to bail the bank of its cash-mess, despite the fact that it has a long way to go in serving the customers to their satisfaction.

The UBI branch on its part has often admit, in writing the fact that it fails to meet the need of the SBI branch.

It has already been three days now that the SBI branch has claimed that it is short in cash, and as usual the chest branch has said that they don't have anything to share either.

The chest of the SBI branch here is said to be build in complete conformation of the RBI's specification is ten times the size of the existing UBI chest which incidentally is the chest it depends for now.

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