Govt to announce new cooperative policy: Amit Shah

Union home and cooperation minister Amit Shah has said that the govermnment will bring a new Act to strengthen the cooperative sector, which will strengthen the cooperative movement. It will be a model for India’s development and play a key role in India becoming a $5trillion economy, He was addressing an international conference on cooperatives in New Delhi on Saturday. Shah said his ministry would focus on building cooperative societies as a linchpin of a whole gamut of economic activities in the rural sector, from farm inputs to credit. He said a national software platform, which will be available in local languages, will link primary agricultural credit societies (PACS), district cooperative banks, and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, potentially creating an integrated financial grid. PACS are village-level lending networks that are often the first stop for farm loans in a country where big scheduled commercial banks still don’t adequately cover the poor.

The minister also said processes governing cooperative institutions will have to be made transparent, which are likely to be reflected in the proposed law. New changes are aimed at bringing ease of doing business for cooperatives and development of multi-state cooperatives, he said. Shah said that digitisation of the cooperative sector would be the key to its transformation. “The potential of everything from Kisan credit cards to all kinds of priority sector lending will be increased,” he said, adding the “cooperative sector is central to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of Atma Nirbhar Bharat (Self-reliant India).”Cooperatives are essentially collectives of small producers who pull in their resources to achieve scale and collective bargaining power in markets.India’s cooperative sector is the world’s largest and covers almost 98% of the countryside, with over 900,000 societies with a membership of about 290 million people, according to data from the National Cooperative Union of India.