(GIST OF KURUKSHETRA) Realising Sahakar Se Samriddhi

(January-2023)

Realising Sahakar Se Samriddhi

The cooperative movement emerged as a voluntary movement of the people, carried out democratically by pooling together their resources for completing a given activity to achieve or secure certain benefits or advantages that people cannot get individually and promote specific virtue and values such as self-help, mutual help and general goods of all.

Cooperative

A cooperative is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs, and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise". Cooperatives are people centred, enterprises owned, controlled and run by and for their members. Cooperatives bring people together in a democratic and equal way.
Cooperatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. Cooperatives are democratically managed by the ‘one member, one vote’ rule; members share equal voting rights regardless of the capital they put into the enterprise.

Farmers Organizations

They are farmers’ collectives that enable farmers to integrate themselves into the value chain, decrease transaction costs and increase their income. They can be classified as:
Community-Based, Resource-Oriented: These are small village-level associations that deal with inputs and resources.
Commodity-Based, Market-Oriented: These are specialized in a single commodity, value-added products.

Farmer Producer Organizations and their promotion

These are modeled as an interface between small and marginal farmers and markets by creating and strengthening the forward and backward linkages.
It differs structurally from Cooperatives in governance, membership, and strategy. They emerged as separate entities in 2003 under the provisions of the Companies Act.
The goal of the Farmer Producer Organizations is to organize farmers for backward linkages of inputs like seeds, fertilizer, credit, insurance, information, agriculture extension services etc. and forward linkages for marketing, processing, market-led agricultural production.
The promotion of FPOs was launched as a pilot programme in 2011-12 through two subschemes of Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana namely the National Vegetable Initiative for Urban Clusters and the programme for Pulses development for 60,000 rainfed villages.
A National Policy and guidelines were also released for FPOs in 2013.
The Government of India has developed a special central sector initiative called “Formation and Promotion of 10,000 FPOs” for nationwide implementation during 2021 with a total budgeted outlay of Rs. 6865 Crores.
For product specialization, a cluster-based approach will be followed through “One District One Product”.
The dedicated Credit Guarantee Fund managed by NABARD and NCDC offers adequate credit guarantee coverage to speed up the credit flow to FPOs by reducing the financial burden.
Various civil society organizations and national and international funding institutions are working to support the development of FPOs into viable farmer companies.

Conclusion

FPOs are the most suitable institutional structure for energizing farmers and enhancing their ability to pool their resources. However, a high calibre of representative and enlightened leadership will be required among the grower members for building a prosperous and sustainable agriculture sector.