Indian Railways’ South Central Railway (SCR) zone has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with public sector lender State Bank of India (SBI) to offer ‘doorstep banking’.
The signed MoU will offer assistance in direct pickup of earnings covering all 585 Railway stations over SCR Zone. This facility will help in saving complex activity of movement of cash earnings through ‘cash safes’ by trains by offering direct pick-up of cash from all the railway stations.
This newly introduced facility will curb the difficulties that were faced earlier, besides increasing the pace of financial transactions and digitization of remittance of cash earnings of the Railways.
It will also assit in hassle free collection of traffic earnings by SBI and remittance into Centre’s account avoiding interruption in transmission of traffic cash earnings.
The MoU was inked by Dr B.S.Christopher, Chief Commercial Manager, Freight Services and Shri J.Meghanath, Financial Advisor and Chief Accounts Officer, Traffic on behalf of South Central Railway and Shri Surendra Nayak, Deputy General Manager, Digital and Transaction Banking Unit, SBI, Hyderabad Circle.
The major benefits from the MoU are as follows:
- All the railway stations will now have uniform cash remittance mechanism.
- Real time information pertaining to the cash being deposited by different stations which will provide assistance in better supervision and accountability.
- Avoidance of unwanted buildup of cash at railway stations.
- Smart way of remittance of station earnings.
Speaking on the occasion, General Manager, South Central Railway, Gajanan Mallya said that such understandings will go a long way in streamlining financial transactions accounting.
Prior to this MoU, the earnings generated at smaller railway stations each day were manually sent with the Guard of nominated trains while in case of major stations, earnings were remitted by the concerned commercial supervisor at the nominated nearest banks, which necessitated that Security escorts from Railway Protection Force (RPF) personnel accompany the official. The existing procedure held scope for delay in remittances of cash owing to various factors such as holidays, availability of man power etc.
