The Union Ministry of Cooperation has constituted an Advisory committee for advising the steering committee setup for the development of the National Cooperative Database.
Additional Secretary, Cooperation Vijay Kumar, who is also the Central Registrar of Cooperative Societies, heads the committee. The Ministry of Cooperation, Deputy Director General has been made the convener of the committee.
The members include the Managing Director and Chief Executive of national level co-operative federations including Nafscob, NCUI, Kribhco, NLCF, Trifed, IFFCO, NDDB, NCDFI, Fishcopfed, NCCF, Nafed, Nafcard, NCHF, Nafcub and others.
The office memorandum in this context was released on 24th November 2022 and the first meeting of the committee was held on 25th November 2022.
The first meeting was held under the chairmanship of Additional Secretary (Cooperation) & CRCS Vijay Kumar and deliberations on issues related to phase-1 of National Cooperative Database were held. The meeting was held in hybrid mode.
During the meeting, the members were informed about the activities to be undertaken in phase-1 of National Cooperative Database. The assessment of availability of cooperative data with National Federation & their regulatory bodies, its structure, format and magnitude were also part of the discussions in the meeting.
It is being said that the ministry of cooperation is organizing a series of meetings for the process of making a National Cooperative Database.
The ministry is planning to collect data of cooperatives in two phases. In the first phase, basic identification data on the functional status of cooperatives will be collected. The first phase is likely to be completed by December 2022.
The Ministry of Cooperation conducted a series of workshops/consultations with stakeholders to identify sector-specific parameters for data collection. As per the inputs of these workshops/consultations, Sector specific data collection templates have been prepared.
The work of Phase II is likely to begin by February 1st , 2023 after analysing the results of Phase 1.
In the second phase, detailed data on parameters related to operations of cooperatives, use of ICT, employment, economic activities, revenue and expenditure, assets and liabilities etc. will be collected from the cooperatives.
Union Minister Amit Shah had earlier said in several co-operative meetings that the uniform development of co-ops in different regions of the country is not possible without a reliable co-op database.