Badrul Hasan, the former Executive Director of NCDC has been re-employed to give concrete shape to the NCUI dream project “profiling cooperative societies”. Hasan has joined and is working overtime to finish the ambitious project.
There has been no auditing of cooperative societies in recent times and the data such as 25 crore people and 6 lakh cooperative societies mouthed by cooperators may go for a toss, experts familiar with the matter say. A survey done in one of the districts in Maharashtra found that 50 per cent of cooperative societies exist only on paper without any office or member.
“This has been my first priority soon after I took office”, said the Chief Executive Satyanarayan. A realistic policy and correct approach is not possible on the basis of weak data. “Even govt help would be of no consequence if we do not have profiles of cooperatives with us”, he said with a tinge of pain.
The ambitious plan would focus on each sector of the cooperative separately. Organizations like IFFCO and Kribhco or for that matter Amul are well-organized but what about handloom cooperatives or housing cooperatives and many other cooperatives, asked Hasan emphasizing the importance of job he has taken up.
Data collection is going to be a difficult task no doubt as we are depending on states. The Registrars of cooperative societies would furnish us with the list of cooperatives which we would verify from our own sources before coming to the final figures, said Hasan.
The data received from states are sometimes quite misleading added Satayanarayan. See in Tripura the population is just 35 lakh and the number of co-ops/SHGs is 40 lakhs, he said underlining the unreliability of the state reports.
An M-Tech in Agriculture Data from IIT, Hasan said collection, compilation and processing are essential parts of the process and then we would have pie-chart, bar and other statistical diagrams to pin down the subject.
Satyanarayan clarified that a data has to speak and guide us to take necessary action. It has to be able to guide our policies. ‘Suppose a cooperative bank’s earnings are less than the salaries of staff as the margin of interest is low, how can the co-op body be viable”, he asked.
Cooperative profiling would also focus on viability of cooperative bodies once their numbers are known, said Satyanarayan.
He sounded confident that the project would be completed in the next 6 months. “But I plan to finish it even before that’, interjected Hasan. Hasan also plans to lend an international touch to his job by including cooperatives of other countries as well.