Making the best of the presence of the govt of India Secretary S.K. Pattanayak, Chandra Pal Singh Yadav, NCUI President who is also the President, NCCT floated the idea of having a corpus fund of Rs 500 crores for strengthening the cooperative education and training and sought the support of the govt. in this regard.
Yadav was delivering presidential address in the conference titled ” creating operational synergy” organized by NCUI’s training arm NCCT in Banglore last week. Pattanayak, Secretary in Ministry of Agriculture himself admitted that the cooperative sector has played a significant role in India’s ’socio-economic development, covering villages and various sectors of the economy.’
Chandra Pal said “Ours is an agriculture economy, where cooperatives play a key role. But the cooperative sector being the state subject has been neglected. Cooperatives are the only means to serve farmers effectively. Though cooperatives are facing competitive challenges, the Government is not making necessary provisions in the budget for cooperative education and training”, he added.
He also stressed the need for giving due recognition to the Cooperative Diploma offered by the NCCT in recruitment and promotion, as done in the states of Kerala and Tamilnadu.
Prof. M.S. Sriram in his key note address said capacity building and training needs of the cooperative sector differ in scope in the changing context. The secretaries working in cooperatives in remote villages and interacting with farmers could adopt business practices so they could get opportunities to cross-learn, he emphasized.
Several top ranking bureaucrats expressed their views on creating synergies in cooperative training and education system in all cooperative training institutes in the country. There is need for common educational base for training centres along with exchange of faculty among training institutes, they underscored.
Among other things, experts discussed the role of CAB, Pune in delivering training inputs to cooperatives, focusing on Urban Cooperative Banks, Rural Cooperatives and financial inclusion, the need for capital formation in agriculture, the need for skill upgradation especially in agriculture through proper synergy among cooperative training Institutes.
In his presidential remarks Prof. M.S. Sriram, IIM, Bangalore summarized the focus of technical sessions and stressed the need for ‘who is to bell the cat.’
