What happened to Gramin bank IFSC codes after One State One RRB

In April 2025 the Department of Financial Services notified the amalgamation of 26 Regional Rural Banks under a policy it calls "One State One RRB". The PIB release states the scale plainly:

Department of Financial Services (DFS) has notified amalgamation of 26 Regional Rural banks (RRBs) on the principles of "One State One RRB". This is fourth phase of amalgamation of RRBs. … At present, 43 RRBs are functioning in 26 States and 2 UTs. Post amalgamation, there will be 28 RRBs.

Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Finance, 8 April 2025

43 banks down to 28. The instruments are eleven gazette notifications, S.O. 1625(E) to S.O. 1635(E), all dated 5 April 2025 and issued under section 23A(1) of the Regional Rural Banks Act, 1976, each one taking effect from 1 May 2025.

No IFSC list was ever published

This is the practically important part, and it is a finding you can check yourself.

The complete 46-page amalgamation gazette contains zero occurrences of "IFSC", "MICR", "branch code" or "SWIFT". The notifications transfer assets, rights, liabilities and staff. They say nothing about payment routing codes at all.

Neither the DFS, nor the RBI, nor NPCI published a consolidated old-to-new IFSC mapping for these mergers. As far as we can establish, exactly one of the eleven surviving banks published its own.

The one bank that did publish a mapping

Karnataka Grameena Bank put out a 17-page PDF titled Allotment of New IFS Codes to eKVGB, listing branches of the former Karnataka Vikas Grameena Bank with their old and new codes. 643 rows give both an old and a new code; every old code begins KVGB and every new one begins PKGB.

We can corroborate that from the other direction. Our archive of the RBI branch list shows:

• 654 KVGB codes last present in the release published 11 September 2025, and absent from the next one.
• 643 new PKGB codes appearing for the first time in the release published 24 October 2025.

643 new codes in the official file, 643 rows in the bank's own list. The two agree.

Note the timing, which follows exactly the pattern of the big public-sector bank mergers: the amalgamation took legal effect on 1 May 2025, and the IFSC changes did not reach the branch list until 24 October 2025 — nearly six months later. The merger date is not the code-change date. It never is.

Two banks with almost the same name, and only one still exists

This one catches people, including us. Read carefully:

• Karnataka Gramin Bank — a transferor. It ceased to exist on 1 May 2025.
• Karnataka Grameena Bank — the new entity it and Karnataka Vikas Grameena Bank were amalgamated into. This is the bank that exists today.

Two letters apart. The gazette notification S.O. 1629(E) sets it out: both Karnataka Vikas Grameena Bank and Karnataka Gramin Bank, sponsored by Canara Bank, "are hereby amalgamated into a single Regional Rural Bank, which shall be called as Karnataka Grameena Bank".

What the official branch list still shows today

Here is where it gets awkward, and it is the reason this page exists.

The current RBI branch list — the release published on 1 September 2026, which is the one this entire site is built from — still carries these as live bank names:

The first two are names of banks that no longer legally exist, sixteen months after they stopped existing. The next two do still exist, but under different names, changed by gazette in October 2025. Either way the codes route fine — the branches are real and the payment infrastructure works. It is the names that are stale.

We are not going to pretend otherwise on our own pages. Where our data says "Karnataka Gramin Bank", that is what the source file says, and this page is what we have to add to it.

Renames are not mergers

A second wave in October 2025 is almost entirely missing from the pages that rank for this subject, which either still show the old names or lump these in with the mergers. They were not mergers. The gazette of 23 October 2025 simply changed names under section 3(1) of the Regional Rural Banks Act — for example, S.O. 4836(E) changes the name of Kerala Gramin Bank to Kerala Grameena Bank at the request of Canara Bank.

If your bank's name changed but it was not amalgamated with anyone, your IFSC code is very unlikely to have changed. A rename does not renumber branches.

What to do if you bank with an RRB

1. Check your code here first. Paste it into the search box. If it has been withdrawn from the branch list we will tell you when, and if we can establish the replacement we will name it and show the evidence.
2. If you were a Karnataka Vikas Grameena Bank customer, your code has changed from KVGB… to PKGB…. Your bank's own published list is the authoritative source and is linked below.
3. For the other ten amalgamations, ask your branch. We would rather say that than invent a mapping. No official list exists, and any site presenting a confident conversion for these banks has produced it from somewhere other than a published source.
4. Do not assume a name change means a code change. Kerala and Chhattisgarh were renamed, not merged.

Why the official file lags

It is worth understanding rather than being annoyed by. The branch list is a payments directory: its job is to tell the NEFT and RTGS systems where to route a message. A bank that has legally merged still has the same buildings, the same customers and the same working payment rails on the day after the merger. Renumbering thousands of branches is a core-banking migration, and it happens when the acquiring bank is ready, not when the gazette is published.

That is exactly why the two dates are always different, and why a page that gives you the merger date as the answer to "when did my IFSC code change" is giving you the wrong number with complete confidence.