In order to fulfil the idea of the Union Cooperation Minister on including business and marketing in the co-operative training module, NCUI has launched a marathon effort to rechristen itself as the National Council of Resource Centre.
Talking to the Indian Cooperative, the Chief Executive of the apex co-op body Sudhir Mahajan said that in changing times NCUI also has to change itself to remain relevant to the needs of cooperators and cooperatives.
“NCUI aims to become the nodal center or you can say, Resource Centre of all possible cooperative training modules in the country. We are gathering data from across states and sectors to give final shape to different co-op training modules to be used by cooperatives, now and in future”, underlined the CE.
Currently the apex co-op body is consulting representatives of various sectors which include rural credit, dairy co-ops, fisheries, among others, to develop rough contours of the training module.
Talking to the Indian Cooperative NCUI Chief Executive, who has held a Webinar on the issue with representatives of dairy co-ops including NDDB recently, said that the discussions with stakeholders are fetching two kinds of data-one generic and another sector specific.
With Business Development and Marketing of co-op stuff at the core of the upcoming module, NCUI has written letters to all the existing co-op training centers which included Vamnicom, JCTs in states and even its own body NCCE.
“We have received a lot of materials on the subject from various sources and currently the process of filtering them is going on, ” informed Mahajan adding that sector specific parts are to be separated from those of generic nature.
NCUI has also launched direct and digital communication with representative bodies, one of which with dairy co-ops ended just before this correspondent met Mahajan the other day. The CE intends to interact with representatives of fisheries co-ops, NAFCUB, NAFSCOB and all other co-op federations sooner than later.
“We intend to broaden the cooperative training module. All these modules would be developed here at NCUI which would later be given out to co-op bodies for implementation,” said Mahajan justifying the name ‘National Council of Resource Centre.
The job of NCUI has become challenging in the wake of the Union Ministry declaring to convert PACS into multipurpose co-op bodies. Not limited to offering rural credit alone, new PACS would offer a host of services including Common Services such as making PAN, Aadhar, etc.
“We are aware of the challenge”, said Mahajan emphasizing that the experience gathered by the successful launch of NCUI Haat will go a long way in introducing business and marketing strategies in the co-op training module.