By Mohan Mishra
The cooperative institutions are people’s organization and they give immense importance to education and training for their members and employees. Most of the cooperative institutions depute their leaders as well as employees to cooperative training institution in India for various training programmes. It has been felt over a period of time that these cooperative training institutions are not utilizing their existing potentialities for development in a big way.
We need to unlock their potential to make these institutions impart training on professional lines. We have a set of well organized Cooperative Training Institutions (CTIs) in India but it has been found that there is hardly any synergy and collaboration among these institutions at large. A visionary approach is lacking which can make these institutions dynamic and action-oriented. The stakeholders of CTI’s are more inclined for day-to-day management issues than issues of broader perspective. Who will bridge the gap, is a million dollar question?
If there should be resurgence in the cooperatives, professionalization of the system as well as the functionaries seems to be the only answer. Due emphasis on capacity building of leaders, members and employees to lead the organization towards professional line is the need of the hour. Another important factor for success of any enterprise is the quality of manpower and human resources.
This calls for revamping of all the cooperative training institutions to play a meaningful role and put personal efforts on quality training, programmes and activities across the country. Presently, most of the cooperative training institutions are facing extreme conditions of quality manpower, paucity of funds, poor infrastructure and uncertain and fluid environment. In such situation of unpredictability how to achieve predictable results? No doubt it is a crises period for cooperative training institutions but what should be strategy? Some cooperative training institutions are getting things done with disciplined executions and taking every opportunity to move forward but some are not and probable never will.
It is also felt that level of trust also shows low in uncertain and crises times. Trainers lost confidence in their own organizations.In uncertain road full of pitfalls, everyone decelerates. These cooperative training institutions are facing the vicious cycle of fewer resources, fewer peoples, and more confusion. Trainers try to do two to three tasks/jobs at a time which further leads to loss of focus and lack of professionalism.Trainers are facing the pervasive fear causing psychological recessions.Trainers face the fear of losing job, promotions, retirement benefits etc.
This alarming situation makes them to lose focus and disengage. But in this era of competition and excellence, cooperative training institutions need to anticipate these hazards and still perform and succeed. If CTIs have simple goals repeatedly revise with clear targets and strong follow through success will follow. As a team they had to know their goals and roles in carrying them out and execute precisely. It has been found that some CTIs are performing in exceptional ways. These are islands of excellence among various CTIs who perform better than average. These identified best CTIs may be mentors for the rest CTIs to share their success stories, understand what they have done differently to improve the performance and execution and touch the benchmark.
(Writer Mohan Mishra is Secretary of NCCT)