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Cooperative movement still strong in Kerala

KOCHI: The people of Kerala have continued to confirm their faith in the cooperative movement bringing it to the forefront of Indian States in terms of the average membership in primary cooperatives, average deposits and average credit availed from these societies.

Data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for 2005 circulated at the ongoing State Cooperative Congress showed that Kerala had a total of 1.11 crore members in its 1,628 primary cooperative agriculture credit societies.

West Bengal with 1.79 crore members is the only State that has more members than Kerala in primary cooperatives, but the number of primary cooperatives in the West Bengal is 18,956.

Maharashtra leads the States in terms of the largest number of primary cooperatives. It has 1.06 crore members in 20,984 primary cooperative societies.

There are a total of 1,08,603 primary cooperative societies in the country.

While Maharashtra tops the table in terms of the number of cooperatives, A. Haryana employs 77,414 people in its 2,433 primary cooperatives.

In Kerala, the number of people employed in primary cooperative societies is 18,968.

The average number of those availing loans from primary cooperative societies is 6,294 in Kerala and 5,176 in West Bengal.

The total volume of deposits in the primary cooperative agriculture credit societies in the country is a little over Rs. 18,918 crore and Kerala, accounting for an average deposit of Rs. 4.64 crore per society, is on top of the States. The national average for deposits in the primary cooperative societies is Rs.17.4 lakh.

However, States such as Maharashtra, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh and Punjab are among the leaders in terms of the volume of agriculture lending and these States do not generally tend to raise deposits as done by primary cooperatives in Kerala.

The volume of agriculture lending by cooperative banks in the country during 2002-03 stood at Rs. 23,716 crore. This volume jumped 60 per cent to touch Rs. 39,404 crore in 2005-06.

During this period, Gramin Banks recorded a growth of 250 per cent in this sector. Lending to agriculture by commercial banks grew from Rs. 39,774 crore to Rs. 1,25,859 crore between 2002-03 and 2005-06.

Though agriculture lending grew by 260 per cent during this period, the Economic Survey pointed out that bulk of it went to large-scale commercial cultivators.

The Union government reports said that food production in the country went down from 212.9 million tonnes in 2001-02 to 208.6 million tonnes in 2005-06.

It has been pointed out that food production would go up only if agriculture credit reaches farmers who own less than 0.5 hectares cultivated land as bulk of the farmers in the country own less than 0.5 hectares of land.

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