Helping Those Who Help Themselves

Context: New ministry of cooperation should enable people to leverage community networks, help deal with challenges thrown up by pandemics.

Evolution of cooperatives in India

• Pioneered by Verghese Kurien:With the starting of the dairy cooperatives in the 1950s, the nation took note of this initiative and the National Dairy Development Board was set up in 1965.
• Farmers were allowed to set up companies: A committee was set up under my chairmanship in the Company Affairs Ministry — not the agriculture and animal husbandry ministry — to allow farmers to set up companies.
  • Earlier, Cooperatives outside Anand tend not to hold regular and proper elections. Their accounts are not audited.  Most of them are not like the Charotar Patels. 
  • The Companies Act (Second Amendment), 2002 gave legal backing to the farmers to form Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) that would run on the principle of “one share one vote”.
• Development of institutional funding: The restructured NABARD had a special window for FPCs.
• Leveraging community network: 
  • The networks of the Cheliya community — just as the network of Charotar Patels that Kurien relied on — have played a key role in the spread of the model.
  • For e.g. Tired of electricity board failures, Kurien offered to run a distribution company on a community basis, the model which is working in Kanpur and even Kerala

Need of cooperatives amid pandemic: Pierre-Noel Giraud has written of the world being divided into “settlers” and “globalists”. Giraud believes that the outcomes of the 21st century will depend on how these two groups adjust to each other. Cooperatives have a significance amid pandemic because of the following – 

• The concept of social cooperatives builds on the idea of communities creating infrastructure by using local material and family labour.
• These can be the village tank, paving the village road — with or without MGN- REGA — finishing the last-mile construction of a canal network or even keeping watch on the contractor.
• Reducing vaccine hesitancy, providing food to those waiting outside hospitals and, most importantly, looking after orphaned children are imperatives crying out for the cooperative model.
• Sustainable resource utilisation: The virus is making us see the truth in Mahatma’s famous statement, “There is enough for everyone’s need but not for everybody’s greed”.
• Realising the changed working environments: The new work-from-home model will create several problems as well as offer opportunities. 

Conclusion: The new Ministry of Cooperation should not be just about pumping in money. This is the time to design models that help those who help themselves.