KATHMANDU: During the first eight months of the current fiscal year (up to mid-April), total deposits in Nepal’s cooperative sector plummeted by approximately Rs 100 billion, shrinking the entire pool to 1.029 trillion rupees.

Alongside this drop, credit disbursement decreased by Rs 18 billion, and overall membership fell by around 800,000 individuals, reflecting a sharp decline in public trust.

However, the exact scale of the crisis remains difficult to verify; a government-appointed probe commission recently reported that the Cooperative and Poverty Management Information System (CoPoMIS) is riddled with unreliable data, revealing vast discrepancies in the actual number of registered cooperatives across different official databases.

Experts suggest that while some depositors are withdrawing funds due to rising living expenses, a significant portion is shifting their savings to safer commercial banks amid ongoing systemic irregularities and weak oversight by under-equipped regulatory bodies.