Harco bank staff flay merger with HSCARDB

The Haryana State Cooperative Apex Bank Employees Union has flayed the state government's move to merge the State Cooperative and Agriculture Rural Development Bank (HSCARDB) with the Haryana State Cooperative Apex Bank Ltd (Harco) bank.

The Haryana State Cooperative Apex Bank Employees Union has flayed the state government's move to merge the State Cooperative and Agriculture Rural Development Bank (HSCARDB) with the Haryana State Cooperative Apex Bank Ltd (Harco) bank.

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The government has recently decided to constitute a committee under the chairmanship of additional chief secretary, finance, Rajan Gupta to chalk out the modalities for the merger of two banks.

Protesting against the decision, union president Rajbir Singh Panwar and secretary Surjaram Sharma, in a release, said the merger would have an adverse impact on the financial health of the Harco bank. Stating that the current CRAR (capital to risk (weighted) assets ratio) of the bank was 8.95%, they said as per the guidelines of the Reserve Bank of India, the minimum CRAR of a bank must be 7% by 2015 and 9% by 2017.

However, in event of merger of the two, the CRAR of the Harco bank would fall below the said benchmark following which the RBI would cancel the Harco bank's licence.

They held that the financial health of the HSCARDB was poor with several of central cooperative banks having the CRAR below 4% and also had huge non-performing assets.

The protesters said while they had already registered their protest before the chief secretary against the merger in the past, they would be compelled to resort to agitation if the government went ahead with the merger.