The nano of ATMs for rural masses comes to town

W e want to be the Tata Nano of ATMs,” says Sabarinath C Nair, senior engineer, marketing of Vortex Engineering, a Chennai-based company working on low-cost ATMs. If they succeed, every village in India might soon get an ATM.

Nair was speaking at the Emerging Technologies Conference (EmTech) which concluded on Tuesday in the city. Their aim, he says, is to build ATMs which are economically viable to be set up in rural areas. Also, since power shortage is a reality in these areas, these machines should be able to function even with intermittent power supply.

“We started from scratch. We did not even study how conventional ATMs work, to begin with, and that saved us a lot of money. Our final design was not only more efficient but also free of regressive mechanisms that regular machines are weighed down by,” Nair said.

For one, their ATM has a single computer, as opposed to conventional ATMs that have two computers. Secondly, the cash is stacked on top of the machine instead of at the bottom, the way it is done in conventional machines. In the latter, every time a withdrawal is made, the money needs to be brought up from the base to waist height using a lift mechanism governed by the second computer. This design is responsible for the excess heat produced by ATM machines and that’s one of the reasons why ATM machines are kept in AC rooms.

“With our design, the heat generated is low and so it can be kept in any normal room. This also lowers the power requirement, hence reducing maintenance charges,” Nair says. These ATMs are powered by solar energy. The non-solar ones have a power backup of eight hours to help deal with power fluctuations.

The solar-powered ATMs consume less than 72 units per month, which indicates a saving of 1,728 units per month and at least Rs1,20,000 per year when compared to a conventional ATM. These ATMs also reduce CO2 emissions by at least 18,500 kg per year.

The ATM, which was developed in partnership with IIT Madras, has undergone several stages of trial. “For our first prototype, we used a computer just to see how people in rural areas interacted with them. Later, we decided to use biometric sensors so users won’t have to remember the PIN every time they need to withdraw money. We also wanted to make the machine very simple as we did not want rural people to think of it as something alien,” Nair says.

According to Nair they also worked specifically on the issue of soiled notes which are difficult to count when automated. “We looked at the way accountants in banks count notes and tried to incorporate the same mechanism in our ATM,” he said.

Vortex had conducted a pilot test with SBI bank and recently announced a public rollout of their models in Tamil Nadu in partnership with the bank; 300 will be solar-powered ATMs.
The deal with SBI is worth Rs18 crore and the company is also in talks with three of the top 20 banks in the country and even some micro finance companies. The company currently holds six patents in their name around the ATM machines.

This makes them the first Indian company to create solar ATMs and, that too, at the astoundingly low price of Rs3 lakh; conventional ATMs cost around Rs8 lakh to set up. Nano of ATMs indeed!