Defeating the basic tenet “Cooperation among cooperatives”, IFFCO Annual General Meeting saw only tirades of protest against Kribhco. Speaker after speaker, coming one after another advocated cutting off all links with Kribhco. The societies were told to choose either of the two. The difference between the two giant cooperatives has almost taken allergic proportion with each wanting others to show the gate.
Earlier, the two had ruled that that board director of one can not be on the board of others. Over the years Iffco and Kribhco have been busy getting each other out in the JVs they had entered during peace time.
Number of cooperative societies associated with IFFCO has risen from 57 in 1967 to more than 40000 at present. Kribhco, comparatively small in size has about 6500 cooperative societies.
The genesis of their fight can be traced to Oswal Plant take over. Iffco bought Para deep plant. To keep pace Kribhco began to contemplate buying Oswal’s Saharanpur plant. But it was short of cash. Iffco was not forthcoming and hoped that Kribhco will not be able to generate money. Kribhco cracked the deal with the help of a private player Shyam telecom as a result of which it sells fertilizer of this plant not to cooperative societies but out in the open market. According to experts this unhealthy competition also led to bad bargaining for them as they had to shell out more than market rates to Oswal
But who suffers ultimately? Of course the ordinary cooperative members! Most of the cooperative societies are members of both and fearing financial loss, the helpless delegates echo the popular sentiment with equal zeal in both the meetings. Is not it the mockery of cooperative movement our leaders had visualized?