Kailash Choudhary, Union Minister of State (MoS) for Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare, presented the inaugural NEDAC–Rural Voice Awards 2021 at the Rural Voice Agriculture Conclave in New Delhi on December 23, 2021. The National Cooperative Bank Limited (NCBL) was one of the four awardees.
Headquartered at Lalitpur, NCBL was established in 2003 as the only bank in the cooperative movement of Nepal at the national level. It has been successfully carrying out the cooperative banking business for 18 years. It was primarily established with the objective to meet the financial needs and launch different promotional activities to support its member cooperatives to be more professional and competitive.
The establishment of NCBL, therefore, has a special implication for the development of the cooperative movement of Nepal since the promotion and strengthening of the cooperatives address the country’s major socio-economic deprivations — poverty, unemployment, inequality etc.
At present, the bank, with about more than 9500 member cooperatives covering all 77 districts and with a rapidly growing number day by day, has already extended its network in 41 different places nationwide.
The NEDAC–Rural Voice awards have been instituted jointly by the Network for the Development of Agricultural Cooperatives in Asia and the Pacific (NEDAC) and Rural Voice to recognize excellence in the field of agriculture, rural affairs and cooperatives.