Cooperative bank staff plan stir

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, NOV. 17. Agitated over the Government's indifference, thousands of cooperative bank employees all over the country are planning to launch a nation-wide agitation to pressure the authorities to bail out these banks facing extinction by providing recapitalisation assistance. To save these 40,000 or so banking institutions catering to the farmers, the employees would agitate outside Parliament on the opening day of the coming session. And if the Government failed to respond, they would decide their future course of action, the general secretary of the All-India Cooperative Bank Employees' Federation, Mr. P. Balakrishnan, said today.

He said that about 40,000 primary Agriculture Cooperative Banks out of a total of 98,000 cooperative banks were facing extinction as the Centre had been dragging its feet on providing recapitalisation assistance to the tune of around Rs. 8,000 crores for the past five years. If these banks collapsed, the entire rural credit system would be affected. He said these banks had been demanding this fund from the Centre not because of their inefficiency or due to default from the rural customers. It was because the Central Government's action to waive principal on agricultural loans amounting to about Rs. 5,000 crores. Now the matter was pending before a committee headed by Mr. B.M. Vikhe Patil, Union Minister of State for Finance.

The bankmen, he said, had been clamouring for a Model Cooperative Societies Act to free the cooperative bodies from the clutches of the bureaucracy and political interference. Though the draft bill has been cleared by the Union Cabinet, the Government was yet to table it in Parliament.

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Section  : National
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