Editorial, June, 2023
By Manohar Manoj
Afew days ago Ministry of Cooperation organized a national workshop cum media outreach program on the resurgent cooperative sector of the country, which revealed many optimistic steps taken by GOI. As we know the Department of Cooperation which was earlier running under the Ministry of Agriculture gotten a separate entity two years back and it was transformed into a new ministry. Since then the old cooperative movement of the country has been getting a new multidimensional turnaround. A Plethora of initiatives have been taken during the last two years; out of these, the formation of a national database pertaining to several activities of the cooperative sector is an important one. We have all around 2 lakh primary agriculture credit societies involving around 29 crore citizenry of the country as their members. Around 60 percent of gram panchayat has been covered under its ambit. Under the new initiative, these PACS have been allowed to run several economic activities and also to nurture themselves as an entrepreneur. On behalf of the ministry, a massive computerization program has been launched which has gotten handsome budgetary allocation also. Now the central registrar of the cooperative office is fully computerized and now the whole network of cooperatives is computerized. Government has also gone to add a new feather to the multi-state cooperative law which has resulted in the formation of 3 new multi-state cooperative companies in the field of dairy, seeds, and exports. It would be worthwhile to mention here cooperative is an organizational technique, which can be termed as a new sort of business organization too. Though the history of the cooperative has been more associated with agricultural activities, now the whole gamut of cooperatives tells us that we have either corporate or cooperate in the country. The way around one-fifth population has associated itself with the aura of cooperation, it shows a new parallel economy of the country, where production, processing, warehousing, distribution, marketing, employment, technical know-how so many things are getting visible. The only thing that needs to be done, is to give it an appropriate legal, financial, infrastructural, regulatory, and overall broad policy orientation, which will make this cooperative India, a real economic India.
On the macroeconomic front, the country is doing extremely well with the support of an opportune economic environment prevailing in the country. With the consistent approach adopted by RBI, the country has been able to tackle the menace of inflation which had gone upto 8 percent last year, now it has come down to just 4 percent in terms of CPI and just negative in terms of WPI. 