Thiruvananthapuram Corporation moves fund from SBI

Thiruvananthapuram: Even as Thiruvananthapuram Corporation has said that its main bank account will continue to be at SBI, it has moved the HREDC fund from SBI to Corporation Employees’ Cooperative Society. The money generated from the corporation’s reprographics centre, computer training centre and Akshaya centre, which are supervised by the Human Resources Development Committee,  was earlier invested into a fixed deposit at State Bank of Travancore. Part of the money is used to meet expenses of the HREDC initiatives like the pay of employees.

Corporation had been mulling over other alternatives because of many reasons after the merger of SBT with SBI. It is learnt that other banks approached the corporation with better interest rates, and with promises of better customer interface. In fact, at one point, mayor V. K. Prasanth had gone on record to state that the corporation was unhappy with SBI, especially as they found the transaction charges on its main account too steep to bear.

It was a savings bank account with at least 10 transactions daily. The bank would charge Rs 50 plus service tax for every transaction after three free transactions in a month. As the Mayor expressed displeasure, SBI is learnt to have worked out a deal favouring the corporation. This time, though,  the corporation officials said that there was no discontent, and the shifting of the account was merely because the Cooperative Society provided a better interest rate. The account holds an amount of '30 lakh generated purely through the activities of HREDC.