Cheques set to get a new lease of life with scheme

Eight selected banks worked overtime to ready 59 lakhs cheques for ₹5,700 crore

It will be a comeback of sorts for cheques when Telangana government on Thursday rolls out a one of its kind scheme to promote farming activities.

At a time when the emphasis is on digital payments and terms such as Direct Benefit Transfer, RTGS and NEFT have become a commonplace, the Rythu Bandhu scheme is to be delivered solely through the good old cheques.

For the eight banks, implementation partners of the scheme, what this meant was a gargantuan task that they had to accomplish in double quick time.

“It tested the capacity of all the banks,” said J.Swaminathan, Chief General Manager of State Bank of India’s Hyderabad Circle, about the exercise that saw the banks readying a whopping 59 lakh cheques representing a tidy sum of ₹5,700 crore.

Describing it as unprecedented and a logistics issue, the senior banker said the requirement was so much that the security printers of the banks did not have enough stock of the security paper required to print the cheque within the limited time. “We had to go to the market over a period of one month and mop all the available security paper,” he said, adding for its part, SBI had to ready 26 lakh out of the 59 lakh cheques.

Once in possession of the basic raw materials, the banks approached the printers for the base print, which was followed by the content print that consisted of the beneficiary name, the amount, based on the data shared by the government. “We had to print them in multiple locations... it was a huge logistics issue but our cheque management team managed to pull it off,” Mr. Swaminathan said. All the 59 lakh cheques, expected to be distributed in five phases, had been handed over to the government. A relatively smaller number of leaves, resulting from last-minute additions by the government, would be delivered by Wednesday night, Mr. Swaminathan said.

On the enormity of the task, he said the incremental demand for SBI a year – as replenishment for those used by the customers – would be one-tenth of what it printed for the scheme”

On the cost of the exercise, Mr. Swaminathan said it would be a good amount. The focus, he added, was completing the task at hand, “then we will go towards the expenditure part of it. Once the exercise kicks off... we will make our claim”.