March 29, 2024

Syllabus– General Studies 2(Polity)

Context

Recently, the government announced the formation of a separate Union Ministry of Cooperation, a subject that till date was looked after by the Ministry of Agriculture. Home Minister Amit Shah was given charge of the new Ministry.

Objectives of the new Ministry:

  • It will provide a separate administrative legal and policy framework for strengthening the cooperative movement in the country.
  • It will help deepen Co-operatives as a true people based movement reaching upto the grassroots.
  • In our country, a Co-operative based economic development model is very relevant where each member works with a spirit of responsibility.
  • The Ministry will work to streamline processes for ‘Ease of doing business’ for co-operatives and enable development of Multi-State Co-operatives (MSCS).

The Co-operative Movement:

  • By definition, cooperatives are organisations formed at the grassroots level by people to harness the power of collective bargaining towards a common goal.
  • In agriculture sector:
    • Cooperative dairies, sugar mills, spinning mills etc are formed with the pooled resources of farmers who wish to process their produce.
    • The country has
      • 1,94,195 cooperative dairy societies and
      • 330 cooperative sugar mill operations.

Cooperative sugar mills account for 35% of the sugar produced in the country.

    • In 2019-20, dairy cooperatives had procured 4.80 crore litres of milk from 1.7 crore members and had sold 3.7 crore litres of liquid milk per day. (Annual Report, National Dairy Development Board, 2019-20).
  • Banking and Finance:
    • Cooperative institutions are spread across rural and urban areas.
    • Village-level primary agricultural credit societies (PACSs) formed by farmer associations are the best example of grassroots-level credit flow.
    • These societies anticipate the credit demand of a village and make the demand to the district central cooperative banks (DCCBs). 
    • State cooperative banks sit at the apex of the rural cooperative lending structure.
    • Given that PACSs are a collective of farmers, they have much more bargaining powers than an individual farmer pleading his case at a commercial bank.
  • There are also cooperative marketing societies in rural areas and cooperative housing societies in urban areas.

How much finances do these institutions control?

  •  NABARD’s annual report of 2019-20 counts 95,238 PACSs, 363 DCCBs and 33 state cooperative banks in the country.
  • The DCCBs, whose main role is disbursal of short-term loans to the farming sector (crop loan), distributed Rs 3,00,034 crore in loans.
  • The state cooperative banks, which mainly finance agri-processing industries such as sugar mills or spinning mills, disbursed Rs 1,48,625 crore in loans.
  • In urban areas, urban cooperative banks (UCBs) and cooperative credit societies extend banking services to many sectors that would otherwise have found it difficult to get into the institutional credit structure.
  • According to RBI data, the country has 1,539 UCBs whose total capital in 2019-20 stood at Rs 14,933.54 crore with a total loan portfolio of Rs 3,05,368.27 crore.

Laws governing cooperative societies:

  • Like agriculture, cooperation is in the concurrent list, which means both the central and state governments can govern them.
  • A majority of the cooperative societies are governed by laws in their respective states, with a Cooperation Commissioner and the Registrar of Societies as their governing office.
  • In 2002, the Centre passed a MultiState Cooperative Societies Act that allowed for registration of societies with operations in more than one state.
    • These are mostly banks, dairies and sugar mills whose area of operation spreads across states.
  • The Central Registrar of Societies is their controlling authority, but on the ground the State Registrar takes actions on his behalf.

Necessity of new ministry:

  • It was necessary to restore the importance of the cooperative structure in the country.
  • Various studies suggest that the cooperative structure has managed to flourish and leave its mark only in a handful of states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka etc.
  • Under the new Ministry, the cooperative movement would get the required financial and legal power needed to penetrate into other states as well.
  • Cooperative institutions get capital from the Centre, either as equity or as working capital, for which the state governments stand guarantee.
    • This formula had seen most of the funds coming to a few states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka while other states failed to keep up.
  • Over the years, the cooperative sector has witnessed drying out of funding.

Question- How formation of a separate ministry can help in realizing the visions with which cooperatives were given a constitutional status under 91st Amendment Act?

 

Article- https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-a-cooperation-ministry-7395784/

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

© 2024 Civilstap Himachal Design & Development