The 35 the Annual National Conference of Indian Society for Studies in Cooperation with the theme ‘Cooperative Autonomy; Myth, Or Reality’ was held in collaboration with IIBM, Guwahati 28th-29th February, 2020 at Guwahati.
Dr K Ramesha, Director, IIBM welcomed the dignitaries and Dr Anil Karanjikar, Secretary, ISSC briefed about the conference. Among those present on the occasion were Satish Marathe, Director, RBI, Mumbai, G.H.Amin Chairman, ISSC & Vice-president, NCUI, S. S. Saha, CGM, NABARD, Assam, and others, informs a press release.
In his inaugural address, S.S.Saha, CGM, NABARD, Guwahati expressed his unhappiness about the fact cooperative growth in north east is still not up to the mark. He said that very few credit cooperatives in Assam have a two-tier structure, and even though the crop loan is given with zero percent interest, there are no takers and the cooperatives are in such a bad situation.
Satish Marathe, Director, RBI, Mumbai delivered the keynote address. He was of the opinion that the autonomy of cooperatives is not a myth but it is reality. There are 95000 primary agriculture credit cooperatives in the country and 65000 of them are profit making and out of 1.40 lakh dairy cooperatives, majority are profit making.
Marathe mentioned that the agricultural produce has increased tremendously and three fourths of it is in buffer stock. Unfortunately, there are losses in transit and the produce gets spoiled in storage. Further, there is no processing of agricultural produces in India.
“In India only 20 percent of the agricultural produce is used after processing and value addition. Due to this, the farmers do not get remunerative price for his produce. He also mentioned that the cooperative law is not growth and development oriented”, underlined Marathe who is also on the Central Board of RBI.
G.H.Amin, Chairman ISSC and Vice President NCUI presided over the conference and said that the Multi-State Cooperative Societies Act provides autonomy to cooperatives, but the state laws are restrictive in nature and
hamper autonomy of cooperatives.
The implementation of Constitutional Amendment Act has faced hurdles as there is a case in the Gujarat High Court, Amin added. He emphasized the need for resolving this issue so that the Constitutional Amendment provides uniformity in autonomous growth of cooperatives in all the states.
Technical sessions were organized in which 20 research papers were presented. The research papers were from Dr Anil Karanjkar on Sugar Cooperatives, Dr Madhuri Chaure on Consumer Cooperatives, Dr T Paranjothi on two tier credit structure in the state of Kerala, Swapana Chandera on Information Technology and Autonomy, a few to mention.
The technical presentation by S. G. Patil, Managing Director of Karnataka State Souhadra Federal Cooperative Ltd., Bengaluru was well received and discussed in the Conference. Sanjay Verma, Dy Director, NCUI presented a paper on ‘Are Cooperatives Reluctant to Adopt Social Media’.
Dr K Ramesha Director IIBM delivered the valedictory address.
