Rameez Makhdoomi
Having a great history and legacy, the Cooperative movement in India is traveling a great journey of success and accomplishment. It has with tremendous efforts of the Government reached the grassroots and fast changing the developmental picture of India towards betterment.
In India cooperation has its origin in the last quarter of the 19th Century in attempts to provide relief to the farmers from the clutches of money lenders. The cooperative movement was introduced in India as a State policy and owes its inauguration to the enactment of the Cooperative Societies Act, of 1904.
Recently, Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah addressed the National Mega Conclave on PACS as FPOs in New Delhi on July 14. At the event, Amit Shah underlined the need to revive the cooperative movement. “In such a big country with 65 crore farmers and connected population, it has become important to revive the cooperative movement, advance it, make it transparent, and ensure it reaches new heights,” he said.
On the other hand, we have seen historic legislations and reforms n on the front of the cooperative movement in India. A few tunes back, Lok Sabha also passed the Multi-State Cooperative Societies (Amendment) Bill, which seeks to strengthen cooperatives by making them transparent and introducing a system of regular elections.
The expert pulse is that with the passage of this historic bill, the Great era will begin in the country’s cooperative movement. The Union Cabinet has affirmed its vision that Credit Societies (PACS) in each uncovered Panchayat, viable dairy cooperatives in each uncovered Panchayat/village, and viable fishery cooperatives in each coastal Panchayat/village as well as Panchayat/village having large water bodies, and strengthening the existing PACS/dairy/fishery cooperative societies.
The initial target is to establish 2 lakh multipurpose PACS/ Dairy/ Fishery Cooperatives in the next five years. Also in a big boost, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched an e-commerce app for the cooperatives. Google Cloud and the National Cooperative Union of India (NCUI) have partnered for the app, which is aimed at providing a scalable, easy-to-use technology for the economic empowerment of the cooperatives. The app was launched at the 17th Indian Cooperative Congress (ICC) in New Delhi.
Recently in a function, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla affirmed that the Cooperative movement transformed the lives of farmers and laborers as it is now easy to get a 1 to 1.5 lac loan on zero percent interest through the cooperative.
The cooperative movement has led to enormous prosperity for economically weaker sections. There are gleaming examples like Lijjat Papad, Amul, and other milk cooperatives in southern States like Karnataka and many others which have brought economic prosperity to millions of people from marginalized sections of society.
The statistics related to the cooperative movement in India are full of pride. India has 8.5 lakh cooperative units out of which 20 percent [1.77 lakh units] are credit cooperatives. The remaining 80 percent are non-credit cooperatives involved in diverse activities viz. Fishery, Dairy, Producer, Processing, Consumer, Industrial, Marketing, Tourism, Hospital, Housing, Transport, Labour, Farming, Service, Livestock, Multi-purpose Cooperatives, etc.
The cooperative movement in India is taking the historical and right direction and changing the lives of crores of common humans on ground zero towards betterment. It is an antidote to fight poverty and lead an era of prosperity.
