COOPERATION MUST SUCCEED!
Cooperation must succeed!
On December 2,
2016, Supreme Court will be hearing the plea from 14 District Central
Cooperative banks from Kerala ‘seeking a nod to transact business like banks’,
along with a bunch of petitions on demonetization of Rs500 and Rs1000 before
the Apex court. The problems faced by cooperatives in Kerala,
post-demonetization, have much deeper roots and they have, beyond legal
implications that will be gone into by the Supreme Court, jurisdictional,
historic and political implications, which need to be addressed ‘out of court’.
Post-independence,
though India’s development initiatives heavily depended on the efficient functioning
of public sector undertakings (central and state level) and cooperatives (as commercial
banks did not reach out to semi-urban and rural areas, majority of the rural
population depended on various categories of cooperatives), both these
institutional systems failed to get the nurturing needed from governments to
change with the times and work efficiently in a fast moving, competitive world.
Cooperation being
a concurrent subject, cooperatives became a ‘no man’s land’ in regard to
legislative support, development of infrastructure and most important,
skill-development and acceptance of new technology. Political leadership,
across ideologies, tried to take advantage of the helplessness of cooperatives
by trying to control their affairs with an eye on the huge resources they
managed. Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan was not exaggerating, when he said, some of
the primary cooperative societies in Kerala, manage finances much larger than
the size of the banking business handled by some of the urban cooperative banks
licensed by RBI to ‘do banking business’. What he forgot to tell is, for
decades, cooperatives in Kerala have been short-circuiting the regulatory
system with the knowledge of the state government. The cooperative system in
India needs a cleansing, not by court interference, but through a coordinated
effort in which RBI, GOI and state governments should play their respective
roles. Sooner this happens, the better for the country.
M G Warrier, Mumbai
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