Speaking on the occasion of onboarding of co-ops on GeM, Union Minister Amit Shah said population size is a great advantage in an economy, because ultimately the population is also the market. Till 2014, India’s population was 130 crores, but the market was only 60 crores, as 70 crore people did not have purchasing capacity.
Shah said 60 crore people worried about their next meal and other basic needs and generations went through the same ordeal. Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi opened bank accounts, provided gas cylinders, toilets, electricity, pure drinking water and food grains free of cost to the poor and as a result awakened the aspirations of these people by fulfilling their basic needs.
The cooperatives have the potential to fulfil all these aspirations. Today after fulfilling their primary needs, these people have ambitions to move ahead in life by earning more money and through cooperatives they can fulfil these ambitions.
Shah said if these 60-crore people have just Rs 5,000, they can run the biggest of cooperatives. Giving the example of Amul, Shah said today this cooperative has crossed a turnover of Rs.60,000 crore and 20 lakh women members are not only running the cooperative, but have also been making profits for many years.
The Cooperation Minister said this sector has been neglected since Independence, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi is accelerating its expansion through historic reforms and modernization. Under the leadership of Shri Modi, the Ministry of Cooperation has taken a number of measures for expansion and in the last year the Ministry has been continuously working on 25 to 30 initiatives.
The cooperative sector is active in 32 fields today but the aim is to expand it to about eighty fields, said Shah. The government has to expand cooperatives but there is no database, therefore the ministry is also creating a national level database of different categories of cooperatives.
He said radical changes are also being made in the Multistate Cooperative Act and the government led by Shri Narendra Modi has also decided to computerize all PACS.
