Same scheme, different names: a map of what institutions actually call it

You searched for one thing and the page in front of you is headed another. Shree Account. Bachat Nidhi. Nithya Dhara. Vishwasanchay Yojana. The question is simple and the answer is not obvious: is this the same kind of account I was looking for?

This page maps the names Pigmity has actually seen in use, each one read on the institution's own website on a recorded date. It is built from the dataset rather than written from memory, so it lists what institutions publish and not what the industry is assumed to do.

The short answer

A scheme name reliably tells you what the product is. It does not tell you what kind of institution is offering it, and that second question is the one that decides whether deposit insurance applies.

The clearest evidence for that is sitting in our own records. In Maharashtra, the plain label "Daily Deposit" is published by Indrayani Co-operative Bank and by Shiv Sahyadri Patpedhi. One is a bank; the other is a credit co-operative society. Deposit insurance reaches one of them and not the other, and the two account names are identical.

The map

Every name below appears because an institution published it, not because it is a search term. The table is generated from the 19 institutions whose records are published, so it updates when the dataset does.

One further name sits outside that table because the record carrying it is still in review: Shree Account (Pigmy) at Shimoga District Co-operative Central Bank. It was read on the bank's own page on the date given in the sources below, and is discussed here on that basis. It will appear in the table when that record is published.

Five kinds of name

Sorting the names by what kind of name they are is more useful than sorting them alphabetically, because each kind supports a different claim.

• Generic description — "Daily Deposit", "Daily Deposit Scheme". Describes the mechanism, carries no brand and belongs to no region. Published by banks and societies alike.
• The 1928 name — "Pigmy Deposit" and its variants. This is the name Syndicate Bank used in Udupi, and it travelled with the product. Our records show it published in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Assam, so it is not a single-state word.
• Both names together — "Pigmy Daily Deposit Scheme", where an institution hedges by printing the historical and the generic name side by side.
• Regional name — "Nithya Dhara Deposit" in coastal Karnataka, "Bachat Nidhi" and "Vishwasanchay Yojana" in Maharashtra. These are local-language names, and we scope each one to the states we actually saw it in.
• One institution's brand — "Shree Account", "Mahesh Daily Deposit Scheme", "Nitya Nidhi Deposit". A brand is chosen by the institution. It is not a regulated product category, and the same brand at another institution would need checking on its own terms.

What the evidence establishes, and what it does not

This is the distinction the whole page turns on, so it is worth being exact.

Established: three institutions treat a local name and "pigmy" as one product. Sangli Urban Co-operative Bank publishes its scheme at an address containing both "bachat-nidhi" and "pigmy". Shimoga District Co-operative Central Bank does the same with "shree-account" and "pigmy". Shivdaulat Sahakari Bank's page is headed with the pigmy name while the scheme itself is called Vishwasanchay Yojana. In each case the publisher's own page carries both names, which is as direct as evidence of equivalence gets.

Not established: that any two of these names are equivalent nationally. Reading three institutions' pages tells you about three institutions. It does not license a statement that "Bachat Nidhi means pigmy" as a general fact about Maharashtra, still less about India. A name used for one product in one state may be attached to something with different terms in another, and we have no source that rules it out.

So this site files these labels under one concept because the mechanism is the same. That is a filing decision, openly made, and it is not the same as a claim that the sources call them interchangeable.

Two names that are not what they look like

"Nitya Nidhi" is both a product and a company. Canara Bank's daily-deposit account is the Nitya Nidhi Deposit, inherited when Syndicate Bank merged into it. Separately, Nitya Nidhi India Limited is a Nidhi company — a company under company law, neither bank nor co-operative — and it publishes a product it calls a Daily Deposit Scheme. Nothing we read connects the two. A reader searching that phrase can reach either, and they sit in different regulatory categories.

The spelling has never settled. "Nithya" and "Nitya" both appear in published scheme names, sometimes for the same word meaning daily. The pigmy name is written pigmy, pygmy and occasionally pigmi, as our history of the scheme records. None of this indicates a different product; it indicates that nobody ever standardised the transliteration.

The question a name cannot answer

If you have arrived here from an unfamiliar scheme name, the map has done its job once you can ask the next question. It runs in this order:

1. What is this product? The table above answers it.
2. Which institution actually offers it? The name on the passbook is the scheme; the name on the licence is the institution. Our directory records what each institution published, and on what date.
3. Is that institution a bank or a society? Different things, with different consequences. The is it a bank or a society checklist turns this into questions you can ask at a counter, and the bank or credit society guide explains the categories.
4. Does deposit protection apply? That has its own page: is my deposit protected sets out the eligibility test and how to verify an institution against DICGC's and RBI's published lists.

The scheme name gets you through step one. It cannot get you through step three, which is why a page that only listed synonyms would be of little use.

What we could not establish

• Whether these names are equivalent outside the institutions that publish them. Our evidence is institution-level. No source we read establishes national equivalence between any two labels, so none is claimed.
• What a regional name means in a state where we have not seen it. We did not find Bachat Nidhi outside Maharashtra or Nithya Dhara outside Karnataka. That is an absence in our records, not evidence that the names are unused elsewhere.
• Whether two institutions using one brand offer comparable terms. Brands are chosen, not registered, and we have not compared terms across same-named schemes.
• The full vocabulary. This map covers the states we have researched. Names used in states not yet in the dataset are simply absent, and their absence means nothing about them.