There is bad news for the State Bank of India (SBI) account-holders desperate to encash cheques at the beginning of the month.

Due to tech trouble, local cheques drawn on a bank other than SBI are not getting credited before 10-12 days. Even the clearance of demand drafts is taking over a week.

The slowdown at SBI from last month is caused by the implementation of a new centralised cheque-clearing system.

“There is a problem in cheque-clearing. We are implementing a centralised centre at our Jeevan Deep office, but some software-related problems have cropped up, creating a logjam in the cheque-clearing process,” said an official at SBI’s local head office.

“We hope to normalise things soon,” he added.

Nearly 18 lakh savings and current account-holders of the bank across 175 branches in the city are affected.

Kallol Mukherjee, of Southern Agrifurane Industries Ltd, a liquor manufacturer, is among those hit hard. “Our total business loss due to the cheque-clearing problems at SBI would be Rs 24 lakh. Work has almost came to a standstill,” he said.

Tapan Das, a salaried person with his savings bank account at the CR Avenue branch of SBI, has been waiting for his UBI cheque to be cleared for the past 10 days.

“I had a few monthly household bills to pay this week. I could not because the cheque was not credited in my account. Will SBI compensate me for that?” demanded Das.

The problem surfaced while implementing the new clearing system, a programme the SBI implemented after months of deliberation. “Earlier, the local cheque-clearing process followed a one-tier system — the branch of the account-holder and the local service branch for processing the cheque. Now, it will be a two-tier system with the centralised cheque-clearing centre,” said an official.

No data was available on how many cheques are cleared by SBI branches in town every day, but RBI statistics for 2006-2007 reveal that 6.84 crore cheques, valued at Rs 682,358 crore, were cleared.