Rekindling Hope for Cooperative Victims

The government’s plan to refund the savings of cooperative victims has offered some glimmer of hope to the otherwise troubled sector. The new development comes after the Ministry of Land Management, Cooperatives, and Poverty Alleviation came up with a new process for refunding small savers via a revolving fund, and it has already reached the Finance Ministry level. After it undergoes all the requisite steps, the refunding process will start from families who had deposited small amounts of money, up to Rs. 100,000, and have continuously waited for what feels like an eternity to receive their savings back. The concept of seed money from the Finance Ministry being reused by filling it up again via auctions of assets of the fraudulent as well as troubled cooperatives makes the refunding process easier for the government. To better understand this situation, it must be noted that there have been numerous victims who have been organizing protests and forming committees to convince officials to do something about these issues. They have seen their savings held up in cooperatives that failed due to mismanagement, corruption, and scams. The presence of about 34,000 cooperatives organized in varied layers of the government and developed under their own regulations created such an environment where less monitoring existed along with increased loopholes. Some cooperatives were true to their cooperative principles and members, but many others acted in a manner as if depositors’ money belonged to their personal cash box.