Asserting the cooperative movement in Gujarat is a matter of pride, Union Cooperation Minister Amit Shah on Sunday said leaders from across the country and abroad are surprised when he talks about Amul or the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), an umbrella organisation of 18 district milk cooperative unions in the state with 36.4 lakh members. “Today, the cooperative movement in Gujarat is a matter of pride,” PTI quoted Shah as saying while addressing a large gathering of milk producers in Gujarat’s Panchmahal district.
“Two ministers from Australia and the Netherlands came back to tell me that they got the data provided by me (on Amul) cross-checked on a website whether it was correct or not,” Shah said.
“Such a huge cooperative movement…Rs 60,000 crore turnover through a cooperative movement, nobody imagined this,” he added during his address after remotely inaugurating two plants set up by the Godhra-based Panchamrut Dairy (Panchmahal District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union Ltd) in Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain and Maharashtra’s Malegaon among other projects.
The Union Cooperation Minister also used the occasion to target the previous Congress-led dispensation at the Centre for ignoring the pleas of cooperative leaders for government support.
“Let alone assistance, the previous Congress government even failed to create an environment where cooperative bodies do not face injustice,” he said.
The former BJP president’s outburst came ahead of the Gujarat Assembly elections due later this year.
Shah said Prime Minister Narendra Modi formed the Ministry of Cooperation to give priority to this sector.
“He also increased the budget for cooperatives seven times, removed some taxes in the sugar sector, reduced the MAT (minimum alternate tax) to 15 from 18 per cent, and surcharge to 7 from 12 per cent on cooperative organisations,” he added.
Shah also took potshots at the Congress for not providing constitutional status to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in 70 years of its rule “something that the Narendra Modi government did” through 123rd amendment in the Constitution.
Stating the ruling dispensation’s many welfare schemes are for the OBCs, Dalits and tribals, he said the Centre has brought many reforms for the OBC community and talked about the 123rd Constitutional Amendment Bill that grants constitutional status to the National Commission on Backward Classes (NCBC).
The Union Cooperation Minister said Prime Minister Modi-led government has come up with a project to computerise cooperative societies and connect them directly to the NABARD (National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development), for which Rs 6,500 crore has been provisioned.
“I would tell you as the Minister of Cooperation that through the Cooperative Ministry, there is going to be a huge revolution in the area in next five years under the leadership of Modiji,” he said.
Shah said several steps like creation of a database, training, reduction in taxes and reforming existing laws are being taken in this direction.
He said the projects which he inaugurated for the Panchamrut Dairy will go on to strengthen the cooperative movement in Gujarat’s Panchmahal, Mahisagar and Dahod districts that are covered by the Panchamrut Dairy.
Shah also appealed to the milk producers in the three districts to adopt natural farming fast and informed that Amul has set a target to establish laboratories to examine land (for organic farming) and organic products.
He also inaugurated the newly constructed building of the Panchmahal District Cooperative Bank in Godhra and launched mobile ATM vans for the people living in rural areas in the district.
