Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has resolved the coin crisis at Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust (SSST), Shirdi, sources in the country’s central bank have confirmed.
Lakhs of rupees are donated at the Shirdi Saibaba temple in coins. The SSST was facing a serious problem as banks were struggling to accommodate the coins deposited. The trust has accounts in 13 branches of various state-owned banks.
Under such circumstances, a functionary of the RBI’s Belapur office in Navi Mumbai held a meeting on April 26 with the trust. It was attended by representatives of the 13 banks where the donation money was deposited.
“RBI instructed the bank officials to immediately divert the accumulated coins from their branches to the designated currency chests in Ahmednagar or neighbouring districts. This will create space in the banks. The fresh collection of coins from the temple can be kept there,” a source in RBI told The Times of India.
Since the currency chests of banks provide daily feedback to RBI about the stock of currency notes and coins at the chests, it will enable the central bank to monitor the spaces in the chests. If they run out of space, it would be moved to another chest where space is available.
“As far as RBI is concerned, the coin problem of Saibaba temple has been solved,” said the functionary of the central bank.
SSST CEO Rahul Jadhav said the RBI’s intervention helped resolve the issue. “We hope the four banks that stopped collecting the donations from us will come forward as RBI has found a solution to the problem,” he added.
The SSST has accounts in 13 banks-12 in Shirdi town and one in Nashik. Representatives of these banks visit the temple by rotation to collect the donations and deposit them in the banks.
Four state-owned banks stopped collecting donations since there was no space in their branches to keep the mounds of coins. The remaining nine informed the trust management to immediately find a solution.
The trust gets over Rs 27 lakh as donations as coins of different denominations every month. The accumulated value of the coins in these 13 banks is over Rs 11 crore.
A senior functionary of a PSU bank in Shirdi said his branch has started shifting the coins to the designated currency chest after the meeting. “The banks will have to bear the cost to carry the coins to the chests. But it will help us keep the coins that we collect from Sai temple,” the bank official said.