Care to recall how long you may have waited at an ATM to draw cash just before the announcement of the withdrawal of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes from circulation on 8th of November?
Most of us would admit to have postponed the drawal by an hour or so, even if there were only five people waiting for their turn to draw cash or rush to another ATM in the vicinity. Patience was a rare quality.
But this has completely changed in the last 10 days.
People now wait for hours in a queue to return with some cash. But as luck would have it, notes of smaller denominations are in short supply and the Rs 2,000 denomination note seems really huge (value-wise) on the pocket for most. After the long wait and realising that the tray has dried up ahead of their turn, many rush to join the queue elsewhere at another ATM.
Where there is trouble, there is also business opportunity. Realising the plight of common people condemned to long waits at ATMs, two IT enthusiasts in Coimbatore -Abishek Muthian and Aravindhan Ramachandran - developed an application called - ATMBot, which helps locate ATMs with cash. The ATMBot runs inside Messenger app of Facebook.
The ATM data is crowd sourced and no user data is stored along with ATM data, the duo maintain.
Does this work and do people really look up the ATMBot before visiting the ATM? We could not really infer whether that was indeed the case, but Muthian said that the ATMBot received several thousands of hits with ATM requests..
Meanwhile, the wait continues...