New Delhi: All banks in the country will serve only their respective customers today and will not exchange the old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes from customers of other banks.
According to an announcement made by Indian Banks’ Association on Friday, the decision was made as existing customers of the banks are being deprived of service, due to the huge rush of customers to exchange notes. “All these days our own customers have suffered because we have not been able to do their work. So, we have seen lot of pending work at branches especially for our existing customers. We, from IBA, have taken a view that tomorrow, that is, on Saturday, we shall be exclusively doing work for our own customers. And tomorrow we will not be doing exchange of notes (for outside customers),” IBA chairman Rajeev Rishi said.
“However, senior citizens are exempted and they can go to any bank branch tomorrow to exchange notes which have ceased to exist as legal tender after government’s demonetisation decision,” he added.
The IBA decision is only for Saturday and from Monday onwards all customers will be allowed to exchange notes at a branch of any bank.
Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise announcement on November 8 to demonetise higher denomination notes+ of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000, banks and ATMs across the country have been witnessing serpentine queues to exchange now-invalid currency notes. Last week, banks across the country were open on both Saturday and Sunday to help the sudden currency crisis in the economy.
On Thursday, the government halved the limit of exchange of defunct notes to Rs 2,000. With effect from today, individuals can exchange invalid 500 and 1,000 rupee notes totalling Rs 2,000, as against Rs 4,500 earlier, till December 30.
