Pawar did nothing for co-op sector, says Amit Shah 

MUMBAI: While addressing the inaugural ceremony of the Cooperation Year 2025 Programme in Mumbai on Friday, union cooperation minister Amit Shah trained his guns on former union agriculture minister and NCP founder Sharad Pawar, declaring that the latter did nothing for the cooperative sector. The BJP leader claimed that the Narendra Modi government would ensure inclusive growth of the cooperation sector, and Maharashtra would be the ‘Kashi’ (holy city) of the cooperative movement in the near future.

Shah inaugurated the national urban cooperative finance and development corporation and a year-long training drive for the 10,000 newly constituted multipurpose Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) at the event. He also addressed a cooperative conclave at Malegaon in Nashik and inaugurated a couple of projects.

The BJP politician hit out at Sharad Pawar at both the events. “Some people utilise the cooperative sector instead of helping it as part of the government,” he said. “I would like to ask Pawar saheb what he did for the cooperative sector during his 10-year stint as union agriculture minister in the UPA government. What has he done for farmers? What did he do to address the income tax issues related to sugar cooperative mills? Just marketing and becoming a leader is not enough. You have to work in the field.”

Shah said that the “double-engine government” led by Narendra Modi, Devendra Fadnavis, Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar would ensure that Maharashtra was known as the Kashi of the cooperation sector in the next seven years. “We will ensure employment through the cooperative sector at the village level and marketing of agricultural produce among other steps,” he said. “The Modi government helped sugar mills by waiving their long-pending income tax worth ₹10,000 crore. The Modi government’s decision to export one million metric tonnes of sugar will benefit the sugar mills in Maharashtra the most.”

The union minister said that the cooperative sector would play an important role in making India the third largest economy in the world and a “developed” country by 2047. “The central government has a target of setting up 200,000 PACS in the country, and 10,000 of them have already been formed,” he said. “The aim is to have at least one PACS per village to take care of various small-scale activities such as fishing, dairy development and petrol pump operations.”

Shah said that the central government was launching a ranking system for multipurpose credit societies to help them get credit from banks. “Credit societies working in sectors like dairy development, fishing and urban cooperative banks will be assessed by this ranking from Grades 1 to 100,” he said. “The grades will be done on audit, financial performance and branding among other parameters. This will help them in getting credit finance from banks easily.”

The BJP politician said the year-long drive would help the cooperative sector to grow inclusively and improve its outreach to fulfil the central government’s aim of ‘Sahakar se samruddhi aur samruddhi se atmanirbharata’ (‘Progress through cooperation and self-reliance through progress’).