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It has been a week since PM Narendra Modi’s drive on curbing black money in India was launched. While the money launderers are busy finding loopholes in the decision, the ‘aam janta’ is lingering for cash around ATMs in the city.
With over 200 people standing in a queue at a time, they are not even sure whether the ATMs have enough money. But as they say, necessity is the mother of invention, Manjunath Talwar and Abhijit Khasnis, have come up with an online portal, CashNoCash – to determine if a nearby bank or ATM has cash available or not.
Talwar is the founder of online recruitment portal Hiree, which was acquired by Quikr in July 2016. According to his facebook page, as of now the site is working on a crowdsourced model and the team (of volunteers from Hiree, a Quikr company) will add more value to it as and when more data is gathered.
The website allows a user to search the nearest ATMs based on their current location. Also, one can create alerts to send notifications when the ATMs gets refilled by cash.
On clicking the links available, one can submit the current status of the bank/ATM in terms of Cash, No Cash or Long Wait.
As Manjunath shared with Inc42, “CashNoCash.com is a free service that allows you to find nearest cash points, their availability and waiting times. The status data is crowdsourced, so you can even contribute to the knowledge base. The initiative is supported by Nasscom and Quikr.”
Abhijit further added, “The scale of problem is humongous. The government and financial institutions are doing everything they can. This is our team’s effort to help the cause by using technology and knowledge of the crowd.”
The sudden demonetisation, despite being a move called upon by ‘need of the hour,’ has been termed by the masses as a silent assault by the PM. The decision has raised difficulties majorly for those who are technological novices and until now believed in cash payments only. However, initiatives like these will definitely help to reduce some bit of this chaos.
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