I would like to draw the attention of the State Bank and 1-Link to the plight of the Sohni Dharti Remittance Program. It has been more than a year since the mobile app stopped automatically acknowledging remittances and awarding appropriate points. Then, there was a few months of downtime in the name of an upgrade from the end of 2023 till well into 2024. The current status is as follows:

1. None of the transactions have been automatically picked up for over a year now (these are banking transactions).

2. The functionality for self-award of points always fails, requiring users to raise a complaint for each transaction to get it done.

3. Most complaints are marked as “resolved” with no actual resolution of the issue.

Practically, this is even worse than the system that was in place in the early 2000s. Many remittances do not enter the SDRP system due to these issues. If the idea was to make legal transactions more attractive, SDRP and 1-Link are successfully driving people away from legal channels.

JAWWAD ZAKI,

Singapore.