Jharigaon: Residents of Jharigaon in Nabarangpur district have been deprived of ATM facilities at the time of outages for a month now. The scheduled power cut declared by Southco under Umerkote Gridco is from 7 am to 9 am and 7 pm to 8 pm. This apart, unscheduled power cuts throughout the day are also forced upon the residents.
The scheduled and unscheduled power cuts have given rise to another problem in Jharigaon. Here there is only one SBI ATM and hundreds of customers of Jharigaon and Chandahandi block depend on this kiosk. But they cannot use the ATM during the outages.
“We know the time and duration of scheduled power cuts and we are using the ATM accordingly. But what to do when someone is in the middle of a transaction and power supply goes off. And many of us have experienced such problem,” some disheartened villagers alleged.
The exasperated customers have threatened if immediate steps are not taken to fix the problem, they will resort to strike.
When contacted, Jharigaon SBI Branch Manager Prabhat Kumar Sahoo said the battery of the ATM counter is out of order. Jharigaon branch comes under Umerkote SBI. It all depends upon the chief manager of Umerkote bank to get the problem sorted out.
When contacted, Umerkote SBI chief manager said that efforts are on to get the problem fixed.
PNN
