GUWAHATI, May 23? About 300 employees of the Assam State Cooperative Agriculture and Rural Development Bank Ltd (ASCARD) have been going without regular salaries for the past 22 months. The headquarters of the bank in a highrise building at Ulubari is in a state of utter despair. A sense of gloom prevails everywhere. For years, the bank has done little. For years, the bank has been unable to recover crores of rupees due to it from its creditors. Among the defaulters are some of the ?respectable? persons of the state. According to office bearers of the ASCARD bank employees union, over Rs 6.81 crore is the amount outstanding to the bank.
Addressing a press conference at the bank?s headoffices, the Employees? Union President Ramesh Nath said that there has ben a virtual loot in the bank between 1991 and 1996 (when the Congress was in power), with successive chairpersons doling out money to their favourites, sometimes going against the rulebook. Among those named by Nath as the culprits is Hemoprava Saikia. According to the employees, the result of all that was that lakhs of Rupees were taken by some individuals as loans which are still unpaid. Among those named by the employees is a media baron who had taken two loans totalling Rs 61.45 lakh. The ASCARD employees informed that the first loan of Rs 11.45 lakh was taken by the media baron to buy vehicles for his newspaper group. Of that, Rs 5 lakh is still unpaid. The bigger loan of Rs 50 lakh was taken by the same person, but in the name of his Jorhat-based company. That loan, along with the interest, has swelled to over Rs 1 crore, the employees union said.
There are several similar cases that the ASCARD bank employees say have contributed to the mess in the bank. In Kamrup district alone, Rs 3.27 crore is due from defaulters in 25 cases. Of that a mere Rs 9.91 lakh has been recovered through the Bakijai officials. As if the huge default if not enough, the ASCARD employees are alarmed by the brash manner in which the Krishna Credit Company (KCC) is operating in the state under the banner of the ASCARD bank though the bank has washed its hands off it since the mid-1990s.
Nath said that for some strange reasons, the ASCARD bank management decided to go for a merger with the KCC in 1993. 25 branches of the private company in Assam were merged with the ASCARD bank. By an agreement with the KCC managers? association, it was allowed to run an ASCARD Bank deposit wing. Within two years, the ASCARD management had decided to cut off the links with the KCC, but the company, despite a High Court order, is going about collecting money from the people, Nath said. He cited instances of the KCC not paying back the matured sums.
Accusing the Registrar of Cooperative Societies (RCS) of not doing anything about it, Nath said that the KCC is running without any registration with the RCS, without any head office or board of directors. They should not have been allowed to operate in the state at all, Nath stated. He said that the KCC offices in the districts are having a free run without any control. In the process, they are duping hundreds of people of their hard-earned money. Nath also cited the instance of KCC branches vanishing from towns after huge amounts had been collected. The employees union president also accused the management of the ASCARD bank of maintaining a stoic silence over the entire matter and hinted that they may be doing so intentionally.
Meanwhile, the ASCARD bank itself is preparing to wake up from its prolonged slumber and there are plans to distribute some power tillers among farmers for a beginning, the employees? union informed. A fixed deposit scheme has also been started, they said. An official from the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural development (NABARD) has been posted on deputation at the ASCARD Bank headquarters as a director. The employees are pinning their hopes on him to turn around the bank?s fortunes.