The bank has promised to test the compliance at various customer sites by its in-house teams to ensure that all the customers are Y2K compliant.

The bank plans to hold customer-awareness programmes at all its branches. "The exercise will be undertaken from this month cluminating towards 2000," said the official. Among the precautions, the customer will be asked to keep a good amount of liquid cash to prevent inconveniences in case of any failure resulting in breakdown of the banking operations, which can take up to a week to be repaired. SBI has also directed all branches to keep copies and all documents of all transactions anddeposits, and update depositors' passbooks till the last transaction.

SBI has completed its Y2K preparedness and compatibility tests. India's largest public-sector bank, with about 9000 branches, has also put in place contingency plans to counter any failure of the systems. A disaster-recovery planning and management has been finalised with a task force in charge of the affairs. The bank has budgeted an expenditure of Rs 50 crore towards this project, and has spent around Rs 37.73 crore so far. The bank has completed year 2000 compatibility of inventories, including all hardware and peripherals, critical and non-critical applications, customer interfaces, regulatory frameworks, and management functions in a phased manner. The bank, which has invested around Rs 280 crore in building up the information-technology infrastructure, has also computerised forex operations and reconciliation and funds settlement. It has put a department manager in charge for a smooth rollover to year 2000 and a special officer tooversee the date change.

Its inter-department Y2K team is headed by a chief general manager. SBI uses Bank Master software Kindle Banking Systems of Ireland. Seshasayi said that Kindle had provided the latest and Y2K upgraded automation packages to the bank, and it has completed the testing of the packages.

The bank has around 1,773 fully computerised branches, and the business covered by computerised branches amounts to 60.63 per cent of the turnover. Among the measures taken, the bank has issued Y2K compliant pass cards and test kits to branches, and has new purchases of Y2K compliant hardware put in place of the mainframe machines.

The bank has replaced hardware at the foreign department and branches at Calcutta, and is upgrading the offices with compliant versions of Kapiti and Bank Master software. "The project cost of Rs 50 crore includes purchase of new hardware, Bank Master upgrade and Novell Netware patches," Seshasayi said. It is also upgrading the Reuters software in these centres.