The curtains for the Indian MICR
Clearing Houses came down in October 2014. The last of our country’s 66 MICR Houses was migrated to
the CTS Grid and a glorious chapter in India’s payment systems came to an end
Any Indian with even a slender
connection to Banks must have been exposed to
physical cheques along with their associated ups and downs.
All the 66 MICR Clearing Houses
spread all over Indian were merged into the 3 CTS Grids i.e Western, Northern
and Southern.
The clearing and settlement are done purely
on the basis of image, instead of physical instruments.
The next target would be to migrate the express
cheque clearing systems (ECCS) locations to the nearest CTS Grid.
At present ECCS is present in at 1,339
smaller centres. The ECCS application package is used at centres with low
volumes and also enables ‘local’ level clearing for participating banks at that
centre. As the volumes are low it is not economically feasible to migrate all
the 1,339 ECCS Centres to CTS. The top 25 ECCS centres can be migrated to the
CTS Grids.
Brief History of MICR Clearing in india:
The need for MICR Clearing in India was
felt in the early 1980’s and the first MICR machine in India was installed in
Mumbai in 1986.
The solution was the introduction of
Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) based mechanised cheque processing
technology.
The existing cheques had to be redesigned
incorporating a MICR codeline4 which could be read by document processing
machines called reader-sorters.
The RBI introduced two types of
reader-sorters - the Medium Speed Reader Sorters, capable of processing 300
instruments per minute for Inter-city instruments and the High Speed Reader
Sorter Systems (HSRS) with speeds of 2400 documents per minute, for the
clearing of local instruments.
Driven by mainframe computers the HSRS
systems were the state-of-the-art systems available at that time. These were
installed in Mumbai (1986) followed by Chennai, New Delhi, (1987) and
Calcutta(1989).
By the middle of 1989 MICR cheque clearing
operations in the four metropolitan cities had become fully operational and
stabilised.
Link 2:
CPSS RedBook
Rest in Peace – Indian MICR Clearing Houses
