The Sentinel: Mumbai: Sunday, June 24, 2018.
The National
Bank for Agiculture & Rural Development (NABARD) had said in a statement on
Friday that demonetised notes presented to district cooperative central banks
(DCCBs) in Maharashtra were higher than those deposited in Gujarat, followed by
Kerala. This statement, in essence, may be misleading. According to RTI
information secured by Mumbai activist Manoranjan S. Roy, Maharashtra’s 30
DCCBs (out of total 370) secured deposits of Rs 3,985 crore worth of banned
notes averaging to Rs 132.83 crore per bank. But, neighbouring Gujarat’s 18
DCCBs were way ahead in average terms in securing deposits of old notes worth
Rs 3,640 crore or an average of Rs 202 crore per DCCB.
What is
important is the average amount garnered by each DCCB, not the total amount in
the state. In average terms, Gujarat tops the list followed by Kerala,
Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in India, as per the RTI documents
released earlier by NABARD. Next to Gujarat in the list is Kerala with 13 DCCBs
getting deposits of Rs 2,094 crore, averaging to Rs 161 crore per DCCB. It is
followed by Karnataka’s 20 DCCBs which got deposits of Rs 1,849 crore,
averaging to Rs 92 crore per DCCB.
Tamil Nadu’s
22 DCCBs collected total deposits of Rs 1,514 crore, averaging to Rs 69 crore
per DCCB. On Thursday, IANS had released a story, based on RTI replies to Roy,
on how the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (ADCB) which has BJP President
Amit Shah as one of its directors collected the highest amount of Rs 745.59
crore among DCCBs in the country. This amount was collected within five days
after the prime minister announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000
currency notes on November 8, 2016. The DCCBs were banned from depositing or
changing old notes after the initial five-day window on fears that black money
may be laundered through this route.
On Friday,
the NABARD had defended ADCB saying that only 9.37 per cent or 1.6 lakh
customers of the bank had deposited the total amount and the average deposit
amounted to Rs 46,795 crore. Roy and others have expressed surprise at why
NABARD was acting as “a spokesperson” for the Ahmedabad DCCB. “At this rate,
the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) may be compelled to justify objectionable
goings-on in big banks like Punjab National Bank or ICICI Bank. This is not a
healthy trend for the country,” Roy said. (IANS)
Goyal
‘forced’ NABARD to issue statement: Congress
New Delhi,
June 23: The Congress on Saturday alleged that Finance Minister Piyush Goyal
had “forced” NABARD to issue a statement “to hide the demonetisation scam by
BJP President Amit Shah” and demanded that audit reports, including those of
NABARD, be made public. Accusing the BJP government of giving “patronage to
scamsters”, the Congress also said that another bank fraud worth Rs 2,000
crore, by the D.S. Kulkarni (DSK) group of companies, had come to the fore in
Maharashtra. He alleged that NABARD deliberately omitted its own RTI findings
which reflected that a whopping Rs 3,118.51 crore worth of old notes were
deposited within the first five days of demonetisaton in 11 Gujarat
Co-operative Banks “closely associated” with BJP leaders. (IANS)