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Future of Cooperatives in India

A Vaidyanathan

This is an expanded version of a lecture given at an international conference on the future of cooperatives in India organised by the College of Agricultural Banking of the Reserve Bank of India in Pune in December 2012. I am grateful to M S Sriram for his comments and suggestions in preparing this lecture.

A Vaidyanathan (a.vaidyanathan053@gmail.com) is a well-known economist based in Chennai.

The cooperative movement in India was started by far-sighted colonial offi cials and later became an instrument of the developmentstate in the post-Independence era, never really becoming a popular movement driven by its members. As the cooperatives have become central to government policy on rural credit, they have come to be entrenched power centres for doling out patronage, fi nancial help and political support. This article proposes some measures for their successful reform.

India recently celebrated the cente-nary of the establishment of co- ope ratives in the country. The fi rst of these societies were started on the initi-ative of colonial offi cials essentially as the best way of enabling farmers to get out of the clutches of usurious money-lenders seen as the major cause of wide-spread rural poverty. Gradually, the scope got extended beyond agricultural credit to cover numerous other activities including production, fi nance, market-ing and processing in a wide range of sectors, as well as trading of several impor tant farm products, consumer stores and housing. The scale of opera-tions of cooperatives in India has grown enormously in this one hundred years.

In 1951 the country, it is reported, had 1,81,000 cooperatives of all kinds with a total membership of 15.5 million. In 2007-08, according to the National Cooperative Union of India, there were some 1,50,000 primary credit coopera-tives with a membership of 180 million, which disbursed over Rs 2,000 billion in that year. There were some 2,60,000 non-credit primary societies of all types with a reported membership of nearly 250 million and an annual turn-over (in 2004-05) of approximately Rs 700 billion.

The expansion in the scope and reach of cooperatives as a whole and in the volume of their activity is impressive. But the process has been highly uneven across activities and regions. Its growth has been, and continues to be, driven by government actions rather than as a mass grass-roots movement motivated by the basic ethos and spirit of coopera-tive enterprise. The manner in which they are organised and function are not conducive to effi cient and prudent use of the vast resources at their disposal. Mechanisms to ensure accountability for effi cient conduct of business and for benefi ting sections of the population

that they are expected to cater to are weak and ineffective. With few signifi -cant exceptions, their fi nances are in a chro nic state of sickness and prone to recurrent crises.

What are the factors and forces that account for this unhealthy state of affairs? What is the experience of efforts to improve the performance of coopera-tives? And what are the reasons that they have not been effective? That these efforts have been ineffective does not mean that cooperatives are foredoomed to failure. On the contrary, it is impor-tant to recognise that effi cient and vibrant cooperatives, organised and managed as democratic, self-reliant and self- managed institutions offer the best means for the vast resource-poor and resource-less segments of the countrys population to improve their living condi-tions. My views are based on this convic-tion and also the belief that, though obstacles to reform are too formidable to be tackled frontally, it is possible, through carefully planned and orche-strated efforts to circumvent and sub-vert the opposition, to generate strong political pressures for genuine reform.

An Altruistic Measure

As mentioned earlier, the cooperative movement owes its origins to the initia-tive of a few visionary offi cials of the colonial government in the early 20th century. The idea of establishing coop-eratives of the type that were proving to be successful in Germany was mooted in the late 19th century. Concerned with the acute poverty of the peasantry, aggra-vated by recurrent droughts, these coop-eratives were seen essentially as a means that would enable farmers to get out of the clutches of usurious moneylenders.

It was soon evident that the basic con-cepts of the organisation and manage-ment of cooperatives did not strike roots that were either strong or wide enough on the ground so as to generate and sus-tain its growth. But the pioneering offi -cials persuaded the colonial government to adopt an active policy of encourage-ment and to provide support to nurture these institutions.

The web version of this article corrects a few errors that appeared in the print edition.

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Weaknesses in the functioning of soci-eties, their failure to promote thrift, excessive dependence on state support, and poor fi nancial management became manifest early on. Their persistence and the need for corrective action too was recognised. But the remedy was seen to lie in tightening the laws and stricter government supervision to ensure greater discipline in their management, rather than by addressing structural defects of the institutions. The Royal Commission on Agriculture (1927) endorsed this app roach and made strong recommen-dations for the continuance of state pa-tronage for cooperatives on the ground that the failure of cooperatives would mean failure of best hope for rural India.

This strategy has been pursued ever since. In the 1930s, the newly estab-lished Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was mandated to play a central role in ex-panding and strengthening credit coop-eratives by providing fi nances to enable them to increase their lending capacity. Gradually, the scope was expanded be-yond agricultural credit to cover other activities. The pace of expansion and di-versifi cation was slow and fi tful in the pre- Independence period but gathered increasing momentum after 1947.

Development Policy Driven

State policy under planning attached a great deal of importance to cooperatives as a desirable form of organisation to en-able small farmers, households and cot-tage industries to acquire greater bar-gaining strength in the economy, vis--vis the big players, through access to credit, input and produce markets. More generally, the concept of organising eco-nomic activity in a spirit of mutual help and managing them democratically for the benefi t of members rather than for profi t had a wider moral and ideological appeal to the leaders of that time. This is refl ected in the prominence given to coo peration in the early fi ve-year plans and the vigorous efforts to encourage, promote and support cooperatives. As a result, there has been a phenomenal expansion in the number of societies and the range of activities covered.

With a few signifi cant exceptions, this growth is largely indeed mostly driven

and sustained by government decisions on the allocation of budgetary funds, and on its policy of targeted expansion of public funding of cooperatives at low rates of interest. Similarly, public fund-ing accounts for most of the resour ces available for lending by cooperatives.

No comprehensive assessment of the performance of cooperatives as a whole is available, nor is it possible with the available data. The subsequent observa-tions relate to credit cooperatives. By far the largest segment of cooperatives in terms of coverage and volume of busi-ness, recurrent crises in their function-ing and suggestions for reform have been examined in depth by both aca-demics and offi cial committees.

Institutional lending to agriculture and allied activities has recorded a quantum growth during the last two decades as a result of the governments aggressive policy of expanding credit to agriculture, as shown in Table 1. Total disbursement in 1990-91 (Rs 128 billion) amounted to about 7% of the countrys agricultural gross domestic product (GDP). This increased to about a third of agricultural GDP by the turn of the century. By the end of the last dec-ade it has grown further, though at a slower rate, and amounts to nearly half the agricultural GDP.

Lending by cooperative credit societies grew much faster than that by banks during the 1990s. Their share in total institutional loan disbursements rose from somewhat over a half in 1990 to nearly three-fourths in 2001. Thereafter, their share has been declining and is placed at a little over half of the total in-stitutional credit in 2007-08. Despite this fall, cooperatives clearly remain the

major source of institutional credit to agriculture and allied activities.

The rationale for aggressive expansion of institutional lending to agri culture and other priority sectors is that, being poor and socially disadvantaged, they cannot get credit from traditional infor-mal sources or for that matter from com-mercial banks on a scale and at rates that would enable them to increase the pro-ductivity of their own resources or avail of other opportunities for raising their incomes in a growing economy.

Inadequacy and high cost of credit are indeed severe constraints facing most rural households and small enterprises. But, effectiveness of policy depends on a realistic assessment of their overall credit needs and also on ensuring that credit of the magnitude required by dif-ferent segments and for different activi-ties actually reaches them. By this crite-rion the policy has been far less success-ful than the above fi gures suggest.

Boosting Agriculture

Most of the increase is on account of in-direct lending to agriculture and allied activities. Their share in total disburse-ments has increased from about a sixth in 1990 to around a half at present. This trend is also evident in cooperatives: in-direct loans comprised about a fourth of their total lending in 1990 and their share is currently over 70%. Direct lending as a proportion of agricultural GDP is current-ly nearly double the 1990 level, but hov-ers between 6% and 7% in recent years. Their share in total direct institutional loans has shrunk from close to half in 1990 to around 30% currently (Table 1).

The reach of the Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) in terms of

Table 1: Growth of Institutional Credit to Agriculture and Allied Activities (Rs billion) 1990-91 2000-01 2004-05 2009-10

Agriculture GDP 1,508 4,496 5,524 10,890

Cooperatives and banks Direct lending 102 482 1,053 2,978

Indirect lending 26 994 1,433 2,237

Total 128 1,476 2,486 5,215

% of indirect to total 20 67 58 43

% of direct to GDP 6.8 10.7 19.1 27.3

Cooperatives Direct lending 48 273 450 749

Indirect lending 17 913 1,141 1,500

Total 65 1,186 1,591 2,250

% of indirect to total 26 77 72 67

% of direct to GDP 3.2 6.1 8.1 6.9

Source: RBI Handbook, 2010-11.

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membership, borrowers, and access to credit from different segments of the ru-ral population is also much less than available data would suggest. According to these data, which are unverifi ed, PACS have 52 million borrowers, one-third of whom are small farmers and artisans (Tables 2 and 3). The number of house-holds in these categories accessing co-operative credit would be much smaller. Moreover, given the uneven distribution of cooperatives across and within re-gions, access to cooperatives is likely to be much less than the average in many areas.

This is corroborated by independent estimates based on the National Sample Survey Organisations (NSSO) household surveys in 2002-03 which estimated that only 13% of rural households report bor-rowing from cooperatives, banks and other institutional sources. The incidence of borrowing from institutions and its volume per household increases with the total value of assets per household. Barely 5% of households in the lowest asset classes report borrowing from

insti tutions compared to more than one-fourth of those in the group with the largest assets. Furthermore, the volume of borrowings from cooperatives esti-mated by the NSSO is less than half the volume of direct loans reported to RBI as having been disbursed to agriculture and allied activities. In the case of other institutions, estimated volumes are 60% lower than reported to RBI.

This is not surprising. In an effort to provide cheap credit to rural areas, the rates at which cooperatives are provided funds, as well as rates charged to bor-rowers, are kept much below rates appli-cable to other borrowers. The differen-tial is so large that it is highly profi table to divert funds borrowed from coopera-tives to other uses. Central agencies, ear-lier RBI and latterly the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), have neither the authority nor the means to check the exploitation of this potential for misuse of funds.

Weak Institutions

The legal framework in which coopera-tives are to operate is framed by state governments. Responsibility for ensur-ing compliance with that framework also vests with them. But enforcement is notoriously lax. Violations of the letter and spirit of cooperative law regarding election of boards, maintenance of proper records and their audit, transparent and objective processes in granting loans, ensuring their proper use and recovery of dues, have been endemic features of cooperatives all over the country. Enfor-cing discipline through supervision of a huge number of dispersed societies is impractical. More active interventions such as appointing government offi cials to manage societies or superseding elect-ed boards have also proved ineffective. Though most of the resour ces of cooper-atives come from public funds, there is no mechanism to ensure prudent and ef-fi cient management of funds.

These diffi culties have been greatly aggravated with the phenomenal incre ase in the volume of public funds channelled through cooperatives, lowering of lend-ing rates, and lax recovery, compounded by periodic waiver of loans as a political strategy of practically all parties for

garnering electoral support. The oppor-tunities for acquiring power and patron-age for personal and party gain by man-aging these funds led to locally well-to-do and infl uential individuals and groups to gain control of societies. Elections became irregular, contentious and were often rigged (or countermanded) to help supporters of parties in power. The result has been a progressive deterioration in the fi nancial health of the cooperative credit system marked by a high propor-tion of societies running losses, with low recoveries and huge overdues.

State governments did little to tackle these problems, but actually aggravated the problem by non-conduct of elections and laxity in audits, by lowering interest rates, and by not just condoning, but actually facilitating non-recovery and delayed recovery of dues. Attempts to manage the problem through frequent supersession of elected boards, interfer-ence in the operational decision-making of societies at all levels, creating a com-mon cadre of government employees to manage operations of PACs, deputation of government offi cials to top positions in many institutions have proved inef-fective. The condition of the coopera-tives has continued to deteriorate. By the late 1980s accumulated losses and unrecovered loans reached unsustaina-ble levels. At the same time political pressures were growing for giving relief to the debt ridden poor peasantry. In 1990, the central government decided to implement a scheme for writing-off loans to farmers, which in turn spawned sev-eral other schemes by states.

Subsequently, a number of national level offi cial committees were commis-sioned to suggest ways to revive and revitalise cooperatives. They considered

Table 2: Primary Agricultural Credit Cooperatives 2001 2004 2011

Number Thousands 98.2 108 93

Viable Thousands 70 67 66

Potentially viable Thousands 33 33 22

No of members Million 102 127 121

No of borrowers Million 55.5 45 52

Paid-up cap Rs billion 44 56 75

of which govt Rs billion 5 6 6

Reserves Rs billion 25 36 69

Owned funds Rs billion 69 92 144

Deposits Rs billion 148 190 372

Borrowings Rs billion 295 402 540

Total resources Rs billion 511 684 1,057

Total loans issued Rs billion 308 392 913

Total loans outstanding Rs billion 408 488 878

Total demand Rs billion 341 478 902

Total collection Rs billion 230 317 675

Total overdues Rs billion 1,106 1,605 1,858

Source NAFSCOB.

Table 3: Regional Concentration of PACS and Their Lending

Societies in S & W '000 48 46 43

Members in S & W Million 50 46 68

Borrowers in S & W Million 37 18 33

Borrowings Rs billion 155 236 312

Total resources Rs billion 382 489 1,053

Total L O Rs billion 273 306 603

Demand Rs billion 235 268 576

Collection Rs billion 137 170 445

Source: NAFSCOB.

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it appropriate for the government to clear, at public expense, accumulated losses and increase the capital base of cooperatives to a prudentially adequate level. The cost of such a package was worked out. But it could not be imple-mented for lack of an agreement on the sharing of costs bet ween the centre and the states. These committees, for the most part, also recognised the need for major legal and institutional reforms to free cooperatives from government interference and make them effi cient.

Undeterred by all this, the central government intensifi ed its commitment to accelerate the expansion of rural credit through cooperatives. Funding for this increased rapidly and by huge amounts. But with institutional defi cien-cies unattended, the fi nancial health of the system deteriorated and reached cri-sis proportions prompting the appoint-ment of another Task Force in 2006 to address the problem.

Like its predecessors, this committee, the Task Force on Revival of Rural Coop-erative Credit Institutions, too gave rec-ommendations for the revi val and revi-talisation of the cooperative credit system at public cost. The argument for this remained the same, that other fi nancial institutions are both incapable of and/or disinterested in providing adequate credit at reasonable cost to asset-less and asset-poor people in rural areas.

The Task Force worked out the cost of restoring the system to a reasonable state of fi nancial health, by wiping out accumulated losses and building up an adequate capital base for the system. The components of the fi nancial pack-age, the principles on which the size of the package for each state, and the shar-ing of the costs between the centre, the states and the cooperative system, as well as the modalities and mechanisms of implementation were spelt out. More importantly, it recommended that both eligibility for central assistance and its release to state governments, and thr ough them to the individual cooperatives, should be conditional on their agreeing to a set of specifi c legal and institutional reforms. Needed changes in the structure and management of societies, and in the legal framework essential to enable

them to function as democratic, self-governing institutions, accountable to their members without any government involvement or interference in their management, were spelt out.

Centre-State Cooperation

The central government, which set up the Task Force, accepted the recommen-dations. But cooperation being a state subject, concurrence by state governments was essential. The centre took an un-precedented proactive initiative to organise a series of high-level consulta-tions with state offi cials and chief minis-ters. A political consensus which endor-sed, in substantial part, the Task Force recommendations was reached, with state governments agreeing that they should implement suggested changes in law, governance and share in the costs, in order avail of central assistance.

Most states have signed the formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) agreeing to make specifi ed changes in their laws and regulations. The audit of the PACs accounts to determine the true extent of accumulated losses has been completed in some and is progressing in others. Many, but not all, are reported to have made the recommended legal changes. The process of audit to deter-mine the quantum of assistance is said to be complete. A large part of the assist-ance is also reported to have been re-leased, thereby enabling the PACS to re-vive their operations.

But subsequent events have thrown considerable doubts about the willing-ness to implement the reforms in letter and spirit. States acceptance of reforms turns out to be more to prevent collapse of cooperatives and get the central as-sistance for enabling them to resume lending, than a genuine interest in imple-menting institutional reforms. Commit-ments agr eed to by states in their formal MOUs have not been implemented fully, some not at all, and in several instances implemented in a diluted form. Imple-men tation is tardy and there are instanc-es of reverting to old ways after receiv-ing fi nancial assistance from the centre.

For instance, in many cases elections have not been held on schedule, and when they have, they continue to be

fought on party lines. Legislation pro-viding for alternative cooperatives mod-els and enabling PACS under existing laws to shift to the new mode have not been enacted, nor has the state govern-ments stake in equity been reduced in many cases. Further, audit continues to be with the line department and its timeliness and quality remain a source of concern. Lastly, cooperatives continue to be run by staff from the state cadre. In short, state government interference remains unabated.

Barely after the agreement was reached on implementing the reform package, the centre announced a compre hensive loan waiver programme in the wake of sharp reduction in output and incomes because of drought, which, it was argued, made it impossible for poor farmers to clear their loan dues. In fact, however, only half of the institutional loans are owed by rural households, the major portion of them comprising indirect loans and the bulk of outstanding being accounted for by a minority of asset-rich house-holds. The relief to the majority of the rural population on account of the wai-ver was marginal, at best. It only suc-ceeded in undercutting the spirit of the reform by reinforcing the already wide-spread expectation among better-off borrowers that they can afford, with im-punity, to not repay cooperative loans, that political pressures can and will lead to periodic waivers.

Assessing Performance

We do not have authenticated data on the performance of the cooperative credit societies to assess how all this affected their performance. Unverifi ed data pub-lished by the National Federation of State Cooperative Banks (NAFSCOB) sug-gest a signifi cant reduction in the total number of societies as well as the number of viable, and potentially viable, societies. The number of staff in PACs has come down, and the volume of lend-ing, which had stagnated in the pre- reform years, has revived. The volume has nearly doubled over a fi ve-year period, but it must be noted that in major part it consists of indirect lending. Collection rates are reported to hover around 65%-70%, at which rate no fi nancial

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insti tution depending wholly on bor-rowed funds can hope to survive for long. The system is headed for another crisis sooner or later.

There is reason for concern that the functioning and management of credit cooperatives may be worse than the data suggests. NAFSCOBs compilation is based on information supposed to be based on audit reports of all societies conducted by the registrars of cooperatives in various states. It is well known that au-dits are done entirely by department of-fi cials and are neither regular nor com-prehensive. Delays in the conduct of au-dits and submission of reports are wide-spread. Audit is limited to such accounts as are available and reports seldom ex-amine whether accounts and records are complete, accurate and up to date. Nei-ther the observance of procedures for grant of loans and their recovery nor the veracity of the reported characteristics of borrowers are properly scrutinised. There is a strong case for an independ-ent survey of a sample of the societies in order to get a reliable and realistic pic-ture of the current status and function-ing of the sector.

Cooperative leadership in states have not reacted to, much less shown interest in addressing, these defi ciencies. This is hardly surprising given the dominance of political groups among them. Those who control cooperative societies are locally powerful, with strong political affi liations. The political class as a whole, irrespective of party, are loath to dilute, let alone give up the power that they get to garner electoral support, reward their supporters and mobilise funds from their control of coopera-tives. Under the existing regime, they are able to abuse this power brazenly and with impunity.

A large number of government func-tionaries currently employed in these societies also have status and power, albeit on a much smaller scale. Not sur-prisingly, they are not enthusiastic about any reform that would mean losing both. Civil society organisations have evinced little interest, much less activism, in ex-posing the large-scale corruption in cooperatives, much less in fi ghting for change. Under these circumstances the

prospects of restructuring this sector on the scale that the government accepted in principle seem very dim indeed.

Way Forward

The strategy, therefore, has to be to fi nd ways to make a dent in the opposition by creating sanctions and incentives for im-plementing some key elements of reform and open up spaces for exploring health-ier forms and practices. In conclusion let me outline some of the ways in which this could be done.

First, programmes for training person-nel for computerisation, internal man-agement and record-keeping, as well as improving the quality of audit of PACS, proposed as part of the revival package must be pursued vigorously. Second, effi cient and well-managed societies should be motivated and facilitated to introduce structural and managerial reforms. The aim should be to trans-form them into models of true coopera-tives that promote thrift, manage loans and repayments effi ciently, and use surpluses for the collective benefi t of their members.

Third, successful and promising inno-vators need to be identifi ed and brought forward to demonstrate to the wider co-operative community, including politi-cians and bureaucracy, the possibilities and impact of institutional reform. The aim should be to mobilise opinion to persuade and pressurise governments to enact model cooperative laws and ena-ble old model societies to migrate to them. Fourth, civil society organisations could play a useful role in mobilising opinion in support of enabling and en-couraging the spread of societies under the model cooperative act. This is one way to blunt the hold of the political class to implement the much-needed in-stitutional reform. Andhra Pradesh has such a legislation that has made it possi-ble to establish and operate cooperatives as truly democratic, self-reliant, effi cient and dynamic institutions. Their strong and proactive civil society lobby has been able to thwart attempts to bring them under the control of the registrar of cooperatives, impede registration of such societies and allow the old-model ones to opt for the new model. This will

be useful to create pressures on the gov-ernment and the political class from within the cooperative movement for implementing institutional reform of wider scope and scale.

Simultaneously, the fi fth point, NABARD needs to play a more proactive role in in-ducing states to fulfi l their commitments to undertake radical legal and institu-tional reforms and eliminate govern-mental interference in their functioning. NABARD can and should play an impor-tant role by (a) conducting a forensic au-dit of the loan portfolios of a representa-tive sample of PACs in each state to check the veracity of their records, of the char-acteristics of their borrowers and pur-poses for which loans have been given, (b) impose penalties, including with-holding of funds, for gross inaccuracies and misfeasance, and (c) make contin-ued access to NABARD funds conditional on the implementation of grass-root lev-el reforms specifi ed in the MOUs signed by the state government.

Sixth, the MOUs signed by states are in the nature of contracts under which they have undertaken commitments to imple-ment a series of specifi c reform meas-ures in exchange for substantial central fi nancial assistance. The possibility of invoking judicial sanctions to enforce these contractual commitments should be seriously considered.

Finally, it is also necessary to get away from insisting on supply-driven targets for agricultural fi nancing. It is high time that greater attention is paid to the de-mand for credit from agriculture. This calls for a careful review of the practice of projecting credit requirements using simplistic and untested assumptions about the relation between output and credit needs. A more disaggregated asse-ssment of the nature and sources of demand for short-term, long-term and indirect lending, for different segments of staple crops, horticulture, and animal husbandry, as well as for post-harvest processing and marketing are needed.

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