By Sanjay Verma
NCUI conducted a cooperative sensitization programme for 10th-12 standard school students of APJ School, Pitampura in Delhi recently and the visiting team was overwhelmed by the curiosity of students about cooperatives.
”We have designed the cooperative sensitization programme of one and a half hours duration for school students as we realize that the school text books have only stray references to cooperatives. So it is necessary to design a programme which can strike a cooperative chord with the young minds ” said Sanjay Verma, NCUI official.
During this programme we covered areas like cooperative principles/values, cooperative organizational structure, strengths of cooperatives vis-a-vis private companies, some successful cases, ways to form cooperatives, etc, he underlined.
‘How can we help potato growers in a village solve their problem of poverty through a cooperative,’’ was the question of a 12th standard student merely after a 15 minutes of presentation which clearly showed that the curiosity level of the students had increased.
‘How can we be convinced that cooperatives are better than private enterprises’, was a smart question of another
Some of these were related to the type of government support for cooperatives, modalities of formation of cooperatives in schools, the nature of cooperatives vis-a-vis private companies, entrepreneurial opportunities in cooperatives, etc. One student in the end got interested in the idea of becoming an entrepreneur through a cooperative, Verma noted with a sense of satisfaction.
“We tried to strongly advocate in presentation that cooperatives can be a very good career option for students as they can have a real sense of satisfaction working for the socio-economic development of the communities instead of making a frenetic rush for money as in corporates. We drew the attention of students to the fact that in times of economic recession, corporates collapsed while cooperatives continued to grow. The success story of Amul was highlighted so as to help them develop a visionary outlook like Verghese Kurien, Verma summarized.
We also explained how they could start a cooperative consumer store on their campuses so that they could enjoy working in a democratic manner while becoming owners themselves. When the workshop came to an end amidst never-ending questions of students, we felt answering questions took a lot of time and our presentations could not cover the entire range of subject , Verma concluded.