The cap comes off
Published 3 October 2026
Thirteen days after the two scheme accounts were opened, a notification arrived that changed the arithmetic of the whole case. It is the notification this file's title is named for.
What the notification did
On Thursday, 9 October 2025, the Haryana Finance Department removed the earlier cap of Rs 50 crore per department for newly empanelled banks other than small finance banks. The change put those banks on par with other universal banks. Before it, a newly empanelled lender such as IDFC First could hold at most Rs 50 crore of any one department's money. After it, there was no such ceiling. AU Small Finance Bank, as a small finance bank, was outside the change.
The cap had been in place since 12 July 2024, the date of the bank's empanelment. A limit like that does two things. It caps the exposure of the government to a single lender, and it caps the damage if something goes wrong at that lender. The CBI's later totals, Rs 504 crore for Haryana and Rs 657 crore with the Chandigarh bodies, are far above Rs 50 crore for a single department, though the losses were spread across eight departments and several civic bodies. The relevance of the cap to the fraud, if any, is a matter for the courts. The CBI and the state have not said in the sources reviewed here that its removal was connected to the scheme.
The bank's account
The bank's regional head for government banking told the CBI the bank had never asked for it. Kapur said IDFC First Bank "has never submitted any proposal" to any Haryana government agency seeking removal of the cap. He told the agency he is the person authorised to move such a proposal for the bank and that he made none, and that he did not know who might have submitted one on the bank's behalf, if one was submitted. He also said the bank's decision-making group held a general view that it would compete better with more accounts than with money concentrated in a few relationship accounts, so it was not interested in removal of the cap. The bank was, he said, "also surprised" when the cap was removed.
ThePrint's questionnaire to the bank asked specifically about how Kapur's account of the cap fits with the bank's plea to be treated as a victim. The bank had not responded when the report was published on 2 October.
Who did?
This is the part of the story the sources do not answer. A notification of the Finance Department changed the rule. It was not requested by the bank, in the bank's account. The file does not say whether any bank employee outside Kapur's chain asked for it, whether a department did, or whether the Finance Department acted on its own. The CBI's chargesheets, as reported, do not attribute the change to any of the accused. ThePrint's report simply records that Kapur does not know and that the bank has not commented.
What can be said without speculation is the shape of the question. A rule that limited the state's exposure to a private bank was lifted for a class of banks that included one whose Chandigarh branch was, by the CBI's account, already the site of unauthorised transactions. The date is documented, the removal is documented, and the bank's denial of having sought it is documented. Who benefited from it, who asked for it and whether anyone asked, are all open.
The cap and the headline
Journalists have a habit of choosing a headline from the line that sounds most like an accusation. The title of this file is borrowed instead from the line that is most like a shrug: the bank's own executive says nobody at the bank asked for the cap to go, and was surprised when it did. If that is right, the most consequential change in the deposit rules of the whole saga was made for no stated reason by a party that has not been identified. If it is wrong, the bank will need to say so. In either case, the cap is the cleanest example in this file of a control that stopped existing and nobody has yet explained why.
A week after the cap came off, a bag of gold coins went into a bungalow garden in Chandigarh.
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