The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has stepped up printing of currency to avoid any repeat of a crash crunch that made headlines in the first week of April. There were various reasons cited for this liquidity crunch by analysts and economists including state elections, holidays and festivals. Whatever the truth, there was indeed a spurt in demand for cash in the preceding month (March), recently updated RBI data revealed:
- Debit card transactions at ATMs amounting to Rs 26,63,501.81 million was the highest-ever in the month of March 2018
Data was available since March 2013
- This translated into a month-on-month growth of 7.6 per cent. In all the previous years, the month of March has always seen a significant growth in debit card transactions at ATMs (in value terms) compared to the preceding month, except for March 2017
- The share of private sector banks in the total amount of debit card transactions at ATMs was around 28 per cent in the pre-demonetisation phase which went down to 19.5 per cent during demonetisation and gradually went up and stood at 26.6 per cent in the month of March
Share of banks in total debit card transactions at ATMs (in value)
Data for the month of March 2018
- In terms of number of transactions, debit card transactions at ATMs in the month of March were the second highest with 7,749.3 lakh transactions. The highest was 8,020.6 lakh transactions in October 2016, just before the note ban
Figures in '000s
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