In a major development on Thursday, the top four leaders of Sahakar Bharati held an hour-long discussion with Union Finance Minister Ms Nirmala Sitharaman and raised several issues plaguing the co-operative sector for long.
Sharing the content of the discussion with the FM, Sahakar Bharati General Secretary Uday Vasudev Joshi informed Indian Cooperative that the Minister gave patient hearing to the issues raised by Sahakar Bharati and told them to come back in a fortnight with concrete proposals so that the govt can work on them.
Though there are many issues we raised which were followed by mailing of a wish-list for the sector to the Minister, we primarily focussed on 4 points, underlined Joshi. First of these was the issue of 80P of credit co-ops which has seen a large number of court cases across the states.
Based on the minister’s reaction, we got a feeling that the FM is keen to resolve the issue of 80P for, at least, the credit co-ops. She asked us to prepare a concrete proposal and come back within a fortnight. “We wish to bury the ghost of 80p for once and all”, added Joshi.
Second issue raised prominently by the team related to the issue of Capital Adequacy for the co-op sector. Quoting experiences of cooperatives across the world, the Sahakar Bharati demanded that the co-ops of the country be allowed to issue shares.
Sahakar Bharati also raised the issue of PMC Bank with the Minister and sought her support for some of the initiatives taken by the RSS body in the matter. “We are trying to create a platform for revival of the PMC Bank in which all the small groups active in resolving the PMC Bank crisis are brought together to make a focussed attempt”, informed Joshi.
Ram Desh Pande, a CA has been nominated as the coordinator for the group which is filled with representatives of depositors, investors and other stake-holders. Joshi is also a part of the group.
The Minister sounded very enthusiastic to the idea and assured to handhold the group and help in all manners possible to resolve the issue of PMC Bank, said Joshi.
Besides these issues, the memorandum submitted by the team touches upon almost all the sectors of cooperative business. While the Minister assured of quick action on the above three points in a time span of a fortnight, she sought one month for the govt to deliberate on other issues.
Other issues included PACS, dairy, fisheries, weavers’ co-ops and several others. The detailed list is given in a separate story.
The four members who were part of Video-Conferencing with the minister included Satish Marathe, Ramesh Vaidya, Uday Joshi and Sanjay Pachpor. The govt side was represented by the Minister alone. Untrained in media skills, Sahakar Bharti team took no photographs of the meeting, sadly.