KATHMANDU, Sept 10: The Kathmandu Valley-based cooperatives have geared up for merger mainly after the cooperatives started to face the problem of liquidity crunch recently.

On Friday, three cooperatives—Lali Gurans Savings and Credit Cooperative, Swarna Laxmi Multipurpose Cooperative and Kalyan Upakar Savings and Credit Cooperative—signed an agreement for unification. These are the financial cooperatives that have big financial transactions of more than Rs 1 billion annually.

The cooperative after the merger will be named ‘Laxmi Kalyan Gurans Savings and Credit Cooperative.’ GB Rai, who is the proposed chairman of the merged cooperatives, said they will have 11,459 of members while share capital will be Rs 31.07 million. The cumulative deposit collection will reach Rs 8.33 billion while the loan investment will be Rs 7.27 billion.

There are over 30,000 cooperatives operating across the country. Although the government had long been pressing the cooperatives for merger, the drive is seen mainly after a number of cooperatives started falling into financial trouble in recent days.

In the past two weeks alone, as many as 19 cooperatives opted for unification. Targeting to check rampant merging of cooperatives, the Department of Cooperatives last week, enforced new guidelines. In the new rule, the cooperatives registered under the same working area can only go to the merger process, while they have to be abided by a number of legal formalities for their unification.  

 
• cooperatives
 
• merger