Despite setback in its original plan of holding more than thirty state conferences across the nation, Sahakar Bharati is still confident of organizing more than 1500 district level conferences around the Cooperative Week this year.
Sharing the details with Indian Cooperative Sahakar Bharati leader Satish Marathe, who is homebound due to the lockdown restrictions in Mumbai said, “Sahakar Bharati proposes to hold district level meetings on six crucial sectors such as Primary Agriculture Co-op Society, dairy cooperatives, fisheries cooperatives, weavers’ co-ops and credit co-operatives.
“The meeting would not be very large and participants would be mostly drawn from the district in question”, said Marathe explaining that the focus would be local. “We would try to find out their challenges and would put in all possible efforts to resolve them”, he added.
The cooperative sectors mentioned by Marathe form the backbone of the cooperative movement in the country and any attempt to help them solve their issues would be a big leap forward, said a few co-operators in Delhi reacting to the Sahakar Bharati proposal.
Sahakar Bharati has presence in more than 500 districts across states in the country and the total number of conferences may fall anything between 1500 to 1800, said a Sahakar Bharati official tasked with preparing the blue print.
“We are aware that such a large number of cooperative conferences cannot be completed within the 7 days of the cooperative week beginning November 14”, stated Marathe. What we propose is to begin a week earlier and end a week later of the Co-op Week, he added.
Talking about the state conferences which the Sahakar Bharati had planned for the year 2020, Marathe said “due to the corona virus we had to postpone many of them and a new schedule is being worked out”.
As the rainy season is likely to come by July, Sahakar Bharati plans to hold state conferences after September till the middle of the next year. “Since there are going to be about 30 state conferences we hope to achieve our target by September 2021”, stated Marathe.
The Maharashtra govt has already extended the date of AGM till December 2020 and other states are also likely to follow suit, given the upsetting of the schedule due to the Corona scare. The co-op bodies are likely to delay AGMs, which in turn would help Sahakar Bharati reschedule its State Conferences comfortably, said an official.