India’s heart and soul resides in her villages. Unless rural India becomes socially and economically free, there will be no true progress. The success of our democracy rests with the rural poor and if we want the rural economy to be liberalized, we must empower our farmers.
One of the best ways of achieving this is through co-operatives. Co-operatives comprise a special category of business organizations because their raison d’etre is not profits for distant shareholders, but returns to farmers who invest in land and animals. Thus, to foist discordant and capitalistic decisions for the benefit of a few absentee shareholders will be detrimental to development. Instead, it’s imperative to promote integrated co-operative combines as most significant instruments of development. After all large numbers of people are dependent for their livelihoods on agriculture.
I have fought against the efforts to undermine the interests of our farmers by vested interest – those of unscrupulous politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen or institutions – all my life, and will continue to do so unless someone shows me a better way of helping our nation’s producers to become productive members of our society. Till today, I have not found a better way.
The merit of the co-operative ideology is the co-ordination and balancing of fundamental principles of equality, democratic control and equality in institutions, and practices to maximize social welfare. It is my firm and unshakeable belief that the entire value chain from procurement to marketing is the sole and exclusive domain of the farmer. The moment the farmer loses or dilutes his right over it, being a small producer, he becomes nothing better than a contract labourer. Value addition in the procurement and processing functions is realized only at the time of marketing. If marketing is not in the hands of farmers’ organizations, they will not get a good realization for their efforts as marketing is the only revenue earning part of the value chain.
A case in point is co-operative dairying, based on the Amul model where procurement, processing and marketing is in the hands of the farmers. A massive network, it involves collecting milk from more than 12 million farmers, testing, grading and transporting twice a day from 1,00,000 villages over 10,000 routes to about 180 dairy plants. It is later followed by processing, packing, and sending the milk to the market in almost 800 big and small towns every single day of the year – definitely no mean task in marketing. Delivering wholesome nutrition to the consumers at the most reasonable prices seen anywhere in the world, while transferring the bulk of the value realized back to the farmer is a feat both in marketing as well as in social development. Yet, these co-operatives have often been derided as innocent of marketing skills!
Co-operatives must be headed by professionals armed with tenures long enough to achieve meaningful changes. An officer deputed with ad hoc powers and subject to sudden transfers can hardly be expected to measure up to the task. As a corollary, no political consideration must colour the policies, objectives, strategies and functioning of a co-operative.
My unfinished dream will be accomplished when the farmers of India have a level playing field to compete with other forms of business. The journey I began in 1949 still continues. I believe it will continue until we succeed, until India’s farmers succeed.
Verghese Kurien
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