The pioneers of cooperative movement in India had a vision of an economy based on cooperation and cooperation alone. They envisaged an economy in which- from a needle to airplanes- everything would be produced by the cooperatives. National Cooperative Development Corporation( NCDC) has taken a giant step in this direction by expanding the gamut of its financing to include tourism, rural housing and power generation in the first phase.
Traditionally, NCDC has been involved in financing the agricultural and allied sectors only but as its Managing Director Mr Govindan Nair puts it “We are expanding the gamut to include other areas of economic activities. According to Mr Nair the proposal has already been passed by the Board of Governors and has gone to the government for notification.
Till 2002 NCDC had a minor role to play in cooperative financing as it would finance only those projects which are sent through the state governments. Given the political culture in the states, government lackadaisical approach was leading to no where. An amendment in 2002 empowered NCDC to finance a project directly .
In a short period of eight years NCDC financing rose from rupees 350 crore to about 3600 crores. The sixteen spread out branches of NCDC began to organize meetings of cooperative societies and motivated people to come up with viable projects. They helped cooperative societies in making financial proposal and began to collect forms. The collected forms were sent to headquarters where an expert team would examine them for viability from every angle.
Two other things that the NCDC has taken up are going to impact cooperative sector in a big way. One is financing the storage facilities at a grass root level.The second is planning packages with managerial input for those cooperative units which are weak. It has taken up the matter with state governments for building large scale infrastructure of ware houses and godowns at village level. If successful the role of middlemen will become story of past.
Similarly, rehabilitation and support package for weak cooperative units are also in the pipeline. A corpus of Rs 250 crores will indeed make so many units viable. This corpus will have contributions from Centre ,NCDC, NABARD, IFFCO and state governments. NCDC will be the nodal agency which will also offer managerial input to such units.
NCDC is not in loss. And one reason for this is its strict scrutiny procedure. With greater support from the government NCDC can indeed become an agent of change in the country. The scale at which it operates presently is still small given the vastness of the country. But NCDC Managing Director Mr Govindan Nair is confident of making a mark as in the second phase of expansion he intends to include financing of health and education cooperatives by NCDC. This will go a long way in saving citizens from the clutches of education and health mafias.