The last couple of months have been spectacular for Indian Cooperative. Its readership has doubled in these months. While nearly 10 lakh (one million) people visited the portal in the month of April, the figures for June are a whopping 19.72 lakh.
It means more than 80 thousand people visit the site daily now. Quite a statistic! Even for a general kind of news portal.
What has caused this quantum leap in readership? Our editorial team has been grappling with this question for quite sometime without getting a satisfactory answer.
It is true that Indian Cooperative was launched in a new avatar in the month of April- when the graph of readership picked up. New features such as Cooperative coffee shop- and Cooperative Queries were added. The additional features offered people scope for venting their views.
Cooperative Queries that is being produced with the help of Mr I C Naik, has become popular with more than a dozen queries landing up on our news desk every day. Mr Naik is a retired Chartered Accountant who does it out of sheer resolution to help the cooperative movement.
The special section offered on home page to celebrate the IYC-2012 has also registered a tremendous response. Our stories are being picked up and displayed at News Hub especially created by the International Cooperative Alliance for the occasion. It would not be a surprise if Indian Cooperative turned out to be the biggest contributor to the News Hub.
The portal is aimed at creating a platform for the cooperative sector and reviving the pristine spirit of cooperation that is in a bad way. Reviving this, calls for courage, conviction and of course material support.
We would not like to let go the opportunity to thank our sponsors who take pains to ensure the show called Indian Cooperative goes on. Iffco, Amul, Saraswat Bank and Cosmos Bank figure prominently in this list, more so because they have never been impatient with the editorial freedom of Indian Cooperative even when the issues at stake have closely dealt with them.
Most of all, the success of Indian Cooperative is a tribute to the cooperative movement, the foundation of which could be traced to the growth of human civilization. The International year of cooperatives has indeed been an encouragement to this endeavour.