Banking services in Mumbai came to a virtual standstill on Thursday and Friday following extensive flood damage across the city.
Continuous monsoon rains damaged the lease lines and servers that connect banking branches to the rest of the country. Many ATMs and vital bank power supplies were hit, with some back-up facilities said to have been completely submerged underwater.
Many of the banks – including Citibank, HSBC, ICICI, and the State Bank of India – which use Mumbai as a central hub for processing transactions were faced with significant disruption across their networks.
Although a few banks remedied the problem by Thursday evening, many others remained in a state of chaos and virtually no transactions took place the following day.
In an interview with India’s Ludhiana Newsline, Bhupinder Singh, manager of Centurian Bank, said, Our branch was on lease line, which has been damaged and we did all our work manually. It will take two to three days more for the situation to become normal and till then we will operate in the same manner.
The state government in Mumbai declared Wednesday and Thursday as public holidays, closing down schools, banks and offices.
In India this year, almost 740 people have died in mudslides and floods that were caused by monsoon rains. The rainfall is the highest ever recorded in India, with Mumbai receiving half of its average annual total in 12 hours.