Rs 25,000 at a time: how Nepal's problematic cooperative refund actually works

A neighbour in Koteshwor keeps a passbook in a steel almirah that she has not been able to use since 2080. Rs 4,80,000, most of it from selling her husband's share of ancestral land, deposited at a cooperative two streets away because the office was walkable and the manager knew her father. In Baisakh she got a phone call telling her to open a bank account and bring her citizenship. In Shrawan, Rs 25,000 landed.

That is roughly the shape of what is happening across Nepal right now. After eight years in which the earliest declared cases produced nothing at all, money is finally moving out of the state and back to depositors. It is moving slowly, in fixed instalments, in a specific order, and only for people whose cooperative cleared one particular legal hurdle.

First: is your cooperative actually on the list?

Everything downstream depends on this. The Office of the Problematic Cooperative Management Committee publishes the federal list with claim amounts and depositor counts, and the totals are worth sitting with: Rs 39.93 billion owed to 62,760 depositors across 23 institutions.

The ten largest account for almost all of it:

Look at the declaration dates in that middle column. Several entries on the full list carry 2075-03-18, which is mid-2018. Those depositors waited roughly eight years before the first rupee moved. Of Oriental's 4,259 claimants, a depositors' representative told the Centre for Investigative Journalism Nepal that around 400 had died without seeing their money.

Names people ask about that are not on the federal list: Sahara, Swarnalaxmi, Sano Paila, Karnali, Supreme, iTahari. Civil and Sumeru sit on the Bagmati provincial list instead, which matters because the province runs its own fund with its own rules.

The priority ladder, and where the Rs 25,000 comes from

Two separate mechanisms decide what you receive, and conflating them is the usual source of confusion at the counter.

Mechanism one is the phase ladder, which works upward by deposit size. Phase 1 refunded depositors holding Rs 10,000 or less in full, covering roughly 18,000 people. From Phase 2 onward the payout is 50 percent, with the band ceiling climbing each phase: Rs 50,000, then Rs 1,00,000, then Rs 2,00,000, Rs 5,00,000, and Rs 10,00,000.

Mechanism two is the priority list, which decides who inside a phase gets paid first. Five categories, per the operating procedure:

1. Senior citizens aged 70 and above
2. Depositors with a life-threatening illness certified by an approved physician
3. Single women
4. Persons with complete disability (पूर्ण अपांगता)
5. Depositors holding more than Rs 5,00,000

That fifth entry trips people up. Rs 5,00,000 is not a cap on what you can receive and not a bar on who can claim. It is the line between small and large depositors, and large depositors are on the priority list because they are the ones who cannot be made whole.

Now the number itself. The published rule says a priority depositor receives up to 50 percent of their savings at one time, not exceeding Rs 50,000. In practice, every round paid so far has handed over Rs 25,000 per person, which is what the 50 percent rule produces against the Phase 2 ceiling of Rs 50,000. On 23 Shrawan 2083, 48 depositors across five cooperatives received exactly Rs 25,000 each. The Kathmandu Post describes the priority payment as up to Rs 25,000 every quarter, which is the only source giving it a frequency.

Treat Rs 50,000 as the outer ceiling in the rulebook and Rs 25,000 as what is actually being paid.

What has genuinely been handed back

Worth being precise here, because two very different figures circulate and both are technically true.

Those last three rows need care. On the same day, Kantipur put the cash paid out at roughly Rs 3.5 crore, while the Kathmandu Post reported Rs 71 crore returned to about 11,000 depositors since May, of which Rs 50 crore was settled through account adjustments and only Rs 21 crore was cash. Neither paper explains the six-fold gap between its cash figure and the other's, so read Rs 3.5 crore to Rs 21 crore as the honest range.

The adjustment distinction is the one that matters at your kitchen table. An account adjustment means a depositor who also owed the cooperative money had their savings netted against their loan on paper. It genuinely clears a liability. It puts nothing in anyone's bank account.

Against all of it, roughly Rs 46 billion remains outstanding to nearly 76,000 depositors. Run the division yourself and the picture is bleak: at the pace above, clearing Rs 46 billion takes somewhere between roughly 55 and 270 years. (That arithmetic is mine, not an official projection.) Which is to say the scheme's viability rests entirely on loan recovery and asset sales, not on the Rs 25 crore of government seed money. The fund launched at about Rs 60 crore total: Rs 25 crore from the budget plus Rs 35 crore already recovered from defaulting borrowers.

Recovery is being pushed hard. The committee is freezing bank accounts and passports of borrowers, guarantors and directors, and coordinating to cut off government services.

Filing the claim

The process is notice-driven and runs per cooperative, so there is no single national deadline to miss or catch.

• The trigger. When a cooperative is declared problematic, a notice goes out under Section 112 requiring members, depositors, borrowers and creditor banks to file claims within 35 days of publication. Windows have been extended before, and a fresh window was reopened in 2026 for people who missed the original one.
• Where to file. The online claim form at coopmc.gov.np, or in person at Buddhanagar, Kathmandu. The office lists 01-4771999 among its numbers.
• What to bring. Citizenship certificate, share certificate or other proof of membership, your passbook, and a bank account number. Verification at the payout stage also uses PAN and National ID. Payment is by bank transfer only, so a functioning bank account is not optional.
• The illness category needs certification from an approved physician, not just any prescription.
• Rs 1 crore and above. A notice dated 19 Shrawan 2083 requires depositors holding Rs 1 crore or more to file a separate self-declaration form. If that is you, check the office's notice board for the deadline, which was not published in the summary I could read.

Three exclusions worth knowing before you queue:

1. You owe the cooperative money. Your savings are adjusted against your loan first, and nothing is paid in cash until the loan clears. This is the flip side of the point made in the cooperative loan collapse post: your debt survives the collapse, and it eats your deposit before it eats anyone else's.
2. Your claim is sub judice. Nothing moves until the case concludes.
3. You were a director, a director's family member, or implicated. Excluded outright.

The most common practical snag reported so far is the passbook. If yours was seized, lost, or never issued properly, alternative proof is handled case by case rather than by rule.

Which office is yours

There are three tiers, and going to the wrong one costs weeks. The split follows where the cooperative was registered: of roughly 32,325 cooperatives nationally, only 147 are federally registered, against 6,981 provincial and 25,197 local.

Bagmati's rules are not the federal ones. Its five cooperatives owe Rs 22.38 billion to 14,064 depositors, and when the province launched payments on 14 July 2026 with Rs 17 lakh to 42 people, the caps announced were up to Rs 1,00,000 each for Civil, Sumeru, Laligurans and Namobuddha depositors, and Rs 10,000 for Darshan. Four times the federal instalment, from a different pot, under a different committee.

The 500 cooperatives nobody is refunding

Here is the part that affects more people than everything above, and it is the reason this post exists.

More than 500 institutions across Nepal have stopped returning deposits without ever being officially classified as problematic. Their depositors are outside the government's refund programme completely. There is no fund, no phase ladder, no Rs 25,000. The National Cooperative Regulatory Authority is investigating complaints and evaluating these cooperatives, but as the Kathmandu Post reported on 4 August 2026, the authority does not have a mandate to refund money.

The scale of the queue is visible in the complaint numbers. The NCRA logged 894 complaints against more than 800 cooperatives in FY 2025-26, most of them about failure to return deposits. In Kathmandu Metropolitan City alone, 6,300 depositors had filed by 1 June 2026 seeking roughly Rs 4.77 billion, with the ward and division desks reporting 500 to 1,000 complaints a day at the peak. Small depositors made up 78 percent of complainants, and the typical claim sat between Rs 1,00,000 and Rs 5,00,000. Mediation does sometimes work: Buddha Darshan Savings and Credit in Ward 6 returned money to 34 depositors within two days, was refunding up to Rs 1,50,000, and stated a plan to reach Rs 5,00,000 within a month.

So what actually works if you are in this group? The honest answer is that no route pays you directly. Every available action is aimed at one objective: getting your cooperative formally declared, because declaration under Section 104 is the gate to the fund and to the Section 112 claim window.

• File with the NCRA. It is the body collecting evidence and evaluating which cooperatives should be declared.
• File with your local government's cooperative division. Palika-level desks have mediated partial refunds where the cooperative still has recoverable assets, and KMC's numbers show these desks are where the volume actually is.
• Organise with other depositors of the same institution. Declarations follow documented, aggregated liability. One complaint is a grievance; ninety from the same cooperative is a case file.
• Demand your documents in writing now, while the office is still open. Audited statements, your account statement, the AGM minutes. These become much harder to obtain after an office shutters.

Minister Pratibha Rawal's position, as reported on 4 August 2026, was that "the government has already started returning savings to declared troubled cooperatives." That sentence contains the whole problem. The commitment runs to the declared ones, and nothing has been announced for the rest.

Why no guarantee caught any of this

The gap that made all of this possible is stated plainly on the regulator's own website. The Deposit and Credit Guarantee Fund says its deposit guarantee scheme is "confined to BFIs namely" commercial banks, development banks, finance companies and microfinance institutions. Cooperatives are not on that list and never were.

Set the two systems beside each other:

That savings rate line deserves a second look. NMB Bank's published rate sheet, effective Shrawan 1 2083, pays 2.75% on savings and between 2.75% and 4.50% on individual fixed deposits. Bank rates have collapsed, which makes a cooperative's double-digit offer more tempting in 2026 than it was in 2022, exactly when the recovery machinery is demonstrating what the downside costs. The risk-adjusted version of that trade-off is worked through in the 13% cooperative FD post, and where bank money can reasonably go instead is in the falling-rates post.

Something is being built for the future. The Cooperative (First Amendment) Act 2083, issued as an ordinance on 30 April 2026 and authenticated as an Act on 26 Asar 2083, makes membership of a deposit and credit protection fund mandatory for licensed savings and credit cooperatives. It also requires an operating licence for any cooperative primarily doing savings and credit, with roughly 3,000 licences issued against about 11,600 cooperatives in the registration process as of May 2026. Reporting on the Act also indicates the government may top up when a cooperative's assets fall short of its depositors' claims, though I could not verify that provision against the Act's own text.

None of it is retroactive. It does nothing for the 62,760 people already on the federal list.

Tracking a stuck deposit in Kharchapatra

A frozen cooperative balance is the single easiest thing to mislead yourself about, because it still looks like money in a spreadsheet.

• Do not log it as a bank account. Create it as a separate account named something like "Kantipur Sahakari — CLAIM FILED — recoverable unknown" so it never quietly joins your cash total.
• Write down the recoverable value, not the passbook value. If the committee's own assessment is that assets cover roughly half of liabilities, a Rs 4,80,000 passbook balance is not a Rs 4,80,000 asset. Carry it at whatever you would genuinely accept for it today.
• Log each instalment as income against the claim, not as a deposit. Rs 25,000 arriving is a partial recovery of principal you had already written down.
• Set a quarterly reminder to check your office's notice page. Payment rounds are announced by notice, and nobody calls every depositor.
• Keep the emergency fund far away from this. That money belongs in a commercial bank savings account, for exactly the reason this post documents. The emergency fund post covers the sizing.

What you actually need to know

Three things, in order of what changes your next move.

1. Check the list first. Federal, Bagmati, Koshi. Declaration under Section 104 is the gate to everything, and if your cooperative is through it, your only job is filing a complete claim inside the 35-day window and then waiting your turn on the priority ladder.
2. If it is not declared, your goal is the declaration itself. Complaints to the NCRA and your palika are not a refund request. They are evidence towards the classification that makes a refund legally possible. Filing alone, quietly, achieves less than filing alongside the other depositors of the same institution.
3. Rs 25,000 at a time is the reality, and the arithmetic does not close. Roughly Rs 3.5 crore of cash has moved against Rs 46 billion outstanding. Plan your household finances as though this money is not coming back on any useful timeline, and treat anything that does arrive as a windfall.

The uncomfortable summary is that Nepal built a refund machine for the fraction of cooperatives that got declared, and left the depositors of 500 others waiting for a policy that has not been written.

If you are working through a claim and want a second pair of eyes on the document set or on which office your cooperative falls under, email parjanya57@gmail.com.

This post is part of the Nepal Money Basics guide — the protecting-what-you-have section.