After achieving a milestone in co-op lending by enhancing its loaning by three times in the recent past, National Cooperative Development Corporation is aiming to focus on primary level cooperatives in the country. “The year 2019-20 would be dedicated to primary level co-ops”, declared its MD Sundeep Kumar Nayak in an interview.
Profit is fine but NCDC did not come into existence to earn profit, said MD underling the core value of NCDC which is to help co-op stand on its feet. And to do so, the NCDC has a cost-effective and a highly doable roadmap before it.
“Teaching the fundamental principles of managing a cooperative is the main focus. We wish to see primary level co-ops being managed by a cooperator who is capable both in audit and accounts as well as in co-op principles of decision-making at the grass-roots level”, Nayak underlined.
Explaining the idea Nayak said that besides LINAC, NCDC is going to have five more training centers sooner than later. “Our Regional offices located in Kolkata, Bhuvneshwar, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Gandhinagar are making space for conducting co-op training programs as well”, Nayak said. With these we are going to increase out training capacity by 6 times, stated the MD.
The huge space of these offices would be utilized with just a few thousand rupees on infrastructure to make way for a co-op training center. At its headquarters in Delhi NCDC is creating a designer studio with a MAC desktop and multimedia software to produce training modules in 17 languages.
Sharing details NCDC MD Nayak says “all productions would be home-made and the experience of the officers of NCDC who have put in many years of service in the co-operative sector would be exploited here.” Making You-tube 3 minute videos on different aspects of co-op training is not a big deal, said a confident MD.
Emphasizing on the power of local language in reaching out to cooperators in remote areas, MD said ” we do not need language experts for the it as there are people working with NCDC who belong to different states with mastery over their native language; a mapping has already been done”, he informed.
The plan to begin the exercise will be launched on 5th April when the Regional Directors and staff-members would assemble in Delhi to brainstorm the issue. Later, they would venture out in fields to learn about the ground realities concerning primary level co-operatives.
In one year we plan to reach out to more than 4000 primary level co-operatives and in fact more than 600 people are going to be covered in the next 2-3 months, Nayak said. We are also encouraging women participation and thus have made our training module in a manner that the training ends by evening and there is no compulsion for trainees to stay overnight, stated the MD.