Mumbai, July 11: A computer snag at the Reserve Bank of India's public debt office (PDO) has stalled transfers of government bonds traded by banks. Nearly Rs 3,000 crore worth of securities transactions are pending entry in subsidiary general ledger accounts.

Worse still, there is no immediate rescue in sight, because Wipro Infotech, entrusted with the systems, has run out of spares. The PDO has been forced to fall back on archaic manual operations to keep trading going.

According to RBI officials, the computer system, installed two years ago, broke down on Tuesday leading to a backlog on ownership transfers of securities transacted so far.

But the RBI officials have ensured that the fund transfers, through sale proceeds, are carried out manually on a day-to-day basis and credited to the respective current accounts. The backlog has been only in the subsidiary general accounts (SGL) which maintains accounts of government securities held by account holders, mainly banks.

The RBI follows the delivery-versus-payment (DVP) system for all government bond transactions maintaining SGL accounts with it.

Under the DVP system all government security transactions are immediately verified by the RBI and credited or debited respectively to the SGL accounts of transacting parties.

If there is a sale of government security by Bank A, for example, the RBI debits Bank A's SGL account and credits (transfers funds) Bank A's current account with the sale proceeds.

The snag is not expected to be rectified immediately said a RBI official as the company maintaining the computers, Wipro, has run out of spares, he said. But he said that the computers will "hopefully" become functional by early next week.

Meanwhile, work regarding transfers of securities continue to pile up as the RBI has fully depended on the computerise accounting system. "Everything is fed into the computer and we have no other record," said a RBI official.

"The backlog will rise as long as the error is not rectified," he added It may be recalled in the Rs 5,000 crore securities scandal of 1991, PDO had not reconciled SGL accounts of banks which encouraged several banks to raise money through issuing fake bank receipts.

However, with most banks having computerised their operations, the chances of non-reconciliation appears remote, an official at a state-owned bank said. "But since banks reconcile their SGL accounts once in a month, there could be some mismatches between ours and the PDO's," he said, adding that it will not lead to major mismatches as banks have proof of transactions on their computers.