Despite having gone unheard in the past the cooperative fraternity still believes the NDA government is on track and their demand of greater role for cooperative in the union budget 2106 would be heard.
The President of the apex cooperative body Chandra Pal Singh Yadav said “yes I believe the govt will listen to our genuine demands; I have no reason to believe otherwise”, he said while replying to a question from Indian Cooperative on chances of being heard in this budget.
It is a perfunctory exercise when the union finance minister meets representatives of different sectors in pre-budget consultations. Every year Dr Dinesh Chief Executive of NCUI has been going armed with slide presentations and piles of papers but without any result.
An optimistic NCUI President however said “they had called us; I was ill but Dr U S Awasthi and our Chief Executive Dr Dinesh had gone and presented their case strongly”, he said.
I followed it up by writing a letter to Union Finance Minister listing major concerns of the cooperative sector, he said and called out for his PA Setia to give a copy of the letter to this correspondent.
Chandra Pal said the major issues are IT exemption, parity for tax on dividend from foreign countries, recall of the RBI recommendations on conversion of urban cooperative banks; you will get everything in this letter, he said while handing the letter to the correspondent.
”The cooperative sector is mostly active in agricultural field where it offers everything from seed to fertilizer to loans to markets and yet they are taxed; this is unfair and I look forward to its remediation in the budget, underlined Yadav.