PM Dahal makes a fresh pledge to address the plights of cooperatives’ victims

PM Dahal on Monday instructed Finance Ministry to devise concrete plan to solve the issues related to problematic cooperatives

KATHMANDU, Jan 9: Realizing that the government has failed to address the grievances of a significant number of victims of cooperatives for a long time, Prime Minister Pushpa Kumar Dahal on Monday directed the Ministry of Finance (MoF) to come up with a concrete proposal to address the issue.

Hundreds of thousands of member depositors of cooperatives have been suffering from the misappropriation of their deposited amount by the operators of various cooperatives for almost a decade. Oriental Cooperative and Guna Cooperative were among the first ones to swindle billions of rupees of the depositors.

In the successive period, Civil Cooperative failed to return the money of thousands of its depositors. The then chairman of the cooperative Ichha Raj Tamang is serving a jail term on this charge.

In the past year, a large number of cooperatives fell into financial crisis in the name of not having adequate liquidity with them. Over a hundred multipurpose, savings and credit cooperatives including Tulasi, Sumeru, Shiva Shikhar, Maa Ambe, Swastik, Societal, Kohinoor, Pashupati and Gautam Shree, among others, have been listed as problematic at various government agencies during this period.

But the government has been dilly dallying to address the concerns of the victims by just forming committees and preparing reports and guidelines, without delivering even a single progress in any of these cases. The government formed a Cooperatives Asset Management Committee in 2015 to settle the issues of the problematic cooperatives and has been allocating a budget of around Rs 30 million every year. But the committee’s work is just limited to updating the problematic cooperatives time and again, without fulfilling the task for which it had been set up.

Few months ago, a committee formed by the government submitted a report suggesting reforms in the cooperatives sector and recommended a number of measures for this purpose. But hardly any measures have been implemented till date.

Just on Sunday, a ministerial level meeting of the Bagmati Province formed a three-member committee led by Prasant Adhikari for the management of the cooperatives which have fallen in financial crisis. Despite all these efforts made by the government to spare the blushes, only the depositors victimized by a handful of cooperatives have been relieved as of now.

In the meeting held at the Prime Minister’s Office on Monday, PM Dahal expressed his concern over the victims of the cooperatives. “Develop a concrete plan to address their actual problems,” said Dahal, stating that poorly-governed cooperatives have left hundreds of thousands of depositors high and dry.

In response, Finance Minister Prakash Sharan Mahat suggested devising laws to make Nepal Rastra Bank to regulate the cooperatives that carry out large amounts of financial transactions.