AFTER STRUGGLING to meet expenditures with limited amount of cash on Wednesday, Puneites queued up at post offices across the city on Thursday morning. At Pune GPO, near Sadhu Vaswani Chowk, at any give hour of the day, at least 200 people could be seen standing in the queue. Many complained about work being carried out at a slow pace. A student Aishwarya Ahir, said, “I came here at 11 am and was standing for almost two hours. Till almost 1.30 pm, only one counter was open for customers.” Abhijeet Bansode, Senior Superintendent of Post Office, Pune City East Division, said that altogether an amount of Rs 74,87,000 was exchanged with old notes on Thursday. The exchange amount included the one recorded at Pune GPO along with 61 other post offices that come under the East Division. Total amount received as deposits by the East Division was around Rs 8 crores. In the West division, while cash exchange amount was Rs 3,15,000, the amount deposited on Thursday was Rs 7 crores. A Pune City Post Office, Laxmi Road, official said, up to 5 pm, around 2,000 people visited the post office either to deposit cash or exchange notes. However, there were many post offices that were only accepting cash for deposit but not exchanging due to unavailability of cash. The post master of Shivajinagar Post Office said that the post office was left open for public for an extra hour on Thursday and almost 1,000 people visited. However, those who wanted to exchange cash had to leave disappointed. “The cash reaches us by evening, hence, by Friday morning, we will be in a position to give cash to the customers,” said DS Benkar, post master of Shivajinagar Post Office.
