A committee of nine experts parallelly held several rounds of meetings to formulate their ideas of the new cooperative policy. Meeting both in person and in virtual mode, they have come up with ten suggestions for the consideration of the govt appointed committee headed by Suresh Prabhu.
The members of this committee include Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan, Lok Satta, Rama Reddy, Cooperative Development Foundation (Sahavikasa), Balu lyer, ICA Asia Pacific, Prof. Shambu Prasad, IRMA, Mrs. Mira Chatterjee, SEWA Federation, CS Reddy, APMAS, Santanu Mohanty, Coop Expert and Mrs. Ramalakshmi, APMAS, Vivekanandan, SIFFS
These suggestions were finalized and put on social media just a day prior to the first meeting of NCP in Pune, said C S Reddy of APMAS, an NGO headquartered in Hyderabad and active in the field of co-operative development.
Excerpts
The Ministry of Cooperation, Govt of India has taken a positive step to formulate National Cooperation Policy! We sincerely hope that the Committee appointed for this purpose will consider these 10 Suggestions!
The location of the first meeting at Vamnicom is significant as Sri Vaikunth Mehta, after whom VAMNICOM is named, deeply believed in centrality of members and in their education and training. He said, “Cooperative training is not merely a prerequisite but a permanent condition of cooperative activities.”
The mission to provide policy direction to the Government of India’s “Sahakar se samriddhi” (Prosperity through Cooperation) is entrusted to Sri. Suresh Prabhu, a person well versed in cooperatives and with a track record of undertaking reforms, scripting turnarounds, driving growth-driven change, and achieving results by working in mission mode!
Cooperatives have been recognized by the United Nations as important contributors towards the Sustainable Development Goals and in the words of Sri. Amit Shah, the first Minister of Cooperation, cooperatives have a big contribution to make to India’s S5 trillion economy. Some of the suggestions for the consideration of the National Committee.
1. Wider Stakeholder Consultations & Inclusive Process for Policy Development: The Committee headed by Sri Prabhu has strong representation from national federations and state governments who bring perspectives from sectors where cooperatives play an important role. However, it is short on representation by women and the younger generation.
The National Committee would immensely benefit from the participation of wider stakeholders and holding public hearings & presentations by academicians, researchers and other sector experts. The Chair of the committee can form Sub-committees of the Committee on specific themes.
2. The 97th Constitutional Amendment enacted in 2011, enshrines the fundamental right of citizens to freely form cooperatives and asks states to promote democratic control and professional management of cooperatives.
National Committee must ensure that the National Cooperation Policy is based on the foundations of the Statement of Cooperative Identity which states that a cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise” & Cooperative values & Principles and the Supreme Court Judgement on 97′ Constitutional Amendment on Cooperatives.
3. The Committee could recommend to the Ministry that in the spirit of cooperative federalism the Government of India must engage with States to ensure suitably amended State Cooperative Laws in the light of the Supreme Court Judgement on 97’* Constitutional Amendment for autonomous cooperative enterprises to thrive.
4. The National Policy should promote all forms of collectives in cooperatives, self Help Group (SHG) Federations, Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs), self-reliant cooperatives, irrespective of the legal form under which they are registered, which espouse the values and principles enshrined in the SC.
India has vast diversity in its political space, legal systems, economic approaches, and level of development. The diversity gets translated in the approaches that have marked the development of cooperatives since independence. The policy should recognize these differences, look beyond legal forms and give importance to cooperative identity.
5. The national policy should promote cooperatives in the services and industry sectors as these are growth areas. The services sector comprises a wide range of activities from the most sophisticated information technology to simple and basic services provided by the unorganized sector. The services sector stimulates growth and expansion in other economic sectors like agriculture, handicrafts, transportation, construction, etc.
Cooperatives can play an important role in the services sector by collectivizing workers, increasing their bargaining for productive assets, enhancing financial inclusion, and generating employment and jobs, Cooperatives can also play an important role in adding value to the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) ecosystem by generating cluster effect, selling and buying, and in supporting business support services.
6. The policy should put in place an enabling ecosystem for developing and expansion of the autonomous & independent cooperative enterprises and get the same priori from policy makers and political leadership as privately owned for profit’ enterprises.
The National Policy could recommend including cooperatives as part of the Start-up India Mission. The laws also need to be amended to make it easy to form cooperatives, for cooperatives to raise money (markets, social stock exchange, SR funds) without diluting their distinct identity and equal treatment on par with other economic actors.
7. The COVD-19 pandemic has shown the perils of a market system which values short-term gain over longer-term viability; increases levels of inequality, translates into lower levels of “social capital’ and wellbeing; and suffers from unsustainability. The need is for organizations which can be trusted, which have transparent governance, and a longer-term outlook, while cooperatives possess most of these, the confidence of members and public is lacking and the perception about their performance is wanting, The National Policy can provide a bulwark to nurture and strengthen coops.
8. The National Policy should not stop at just providing broad directions. It should set targets to be achieved and have a way to digitize, monitor, measure and report. The Committee could consider recommending Annual publication of the State of the Cooperative Sector Report which is not just a compilation of statistical data but covers progress made, financial turnover of the cooperatives in achieving the policy objectives.
9. Cooperatives help pool resources and scale businesses which in turn increases income, enhances quality of life, and fosters social change. Cooperatives as people-centered enterprises based on values and principles have an important part to play in contributing to inclusive and sustainable development. “Whereas the shareholders of an ordinary company are its actual owners, the members of a cooperative simply manage assets with a solid territorial identity that will eventually be passed on to future generations. In this way, cooperatives are enterprises that put people before money and work before capital.” Capacity Building & Training must be strongly supported.
10. There is a need for establishing an autonomous National Agency on the lines of PFRDA /IRDA for promotion, development, regulation & supervision of different cooperative enterprises in India. There is a need to have a self-regulation & self- supervision system for the cooperatives on the lines of the German Cooperative Regulation & Supervision system having the auditing federations of the cooperatives and also having their own training & institutional protection system.
Source: LinkedIn