LUCKNOW - India’s largest lender State Bank of India (SBI) Wednesday launched its first Currency Administration Branch (CAB), an exclusive branch to handle currency notes, here.

Also known as cash factory, CAB is part of the bank’s plan to open one currency chest in every city that will distribute notes and rupee coins to the local banks and ATMs, apart from identifying counterfeit currencies.

‘The cash factory will be the nodal point for issuing currency notes to all local SBI branches as well as ATMs. About half a dozen sophisticated note sorting machines will sort out currency notes in four varieties in the branch office,’ SBI (Lucknow circle) chief general manager Shiv Kumar said.

The first variety currency notes will be fed into ATMs. The second variety, known as re-issuable notes, will be kept for customer transactions, while the third one, non-issuable, will be sent back to the Reserve Bank of India, Kumar said.

Mutilated and bad notes detected by machines will come under the fourth variety and will be subjected to further manual scrutiny, he added.

Kumar said the next cash factory will be opened in Kanpur.

‘The new arrangements are aimed at a more efficient and cost-effective centralised currency administration system instead of having multiple currency chests in a centre as prevalent today,’ he said.

For the SBI branches, managing the chests while carrying out routine functions is an additional work. The cash factory will help in better management of currency notes with less infrastructure, officials said.

They added that the CAB would also give a boost to the fight against fake currency in Uttar Pradesh, which is turning out to be a hub for counterfeit currency notes smuggled purportedly across the porous and largely unguarded border with Nepal.

In August last, a Reserve Bank of India team had unearthed counterfeit currency amounting to over Rs.5 million (Rs.50 lakh) from the currency chest of the State Bank of India’s Domariaganj branch in Siddharthnagar district.

Subsequently, the bank’s chief cashier was arrested and a large amount of both genuine and fake currency notes was recovered from his house.