The Union Cabinet on October 12 approved amendments to the Multi State Cooperative Societies Act (MSCS). The Act was last amended in 2002. The amendments will now be presented during the Winter Session of Parliament.
Key points
- The amendments make the functioning of the board of Multi State Cooperative Societies transparent — registration becomes simpler and seats can be reserved for women, scheduled caste and scheduled tribe candidates in coop boards.
- A Cooperative Election Authority can be formed to conduct free, fair and timely elections to coops.
- The Bill will incorporate provisions of the 97th Constitutional Amendment.
- For cooperative banks, the banking functions will be governed by the Banking Regulation Act. However, for all other operational issues of such entities, the MSCS Act and its new amendments will be at play.
- The Act empowers the Central government to suspend the Board of a MSCS for fraud or embezzlement of funds or failure to conduct elections within a stipulated time.
- It also debars relatives of a sitting director to be recruited as an employee in the same cooperative.
- To improve the governance of multi-state cooperative societies, the Bill has specific provisions for setting up a cooperative election authority, cooperative information officer and cooperative ombudsman.
- The election authority will ensure that elections are held in a fair, free and timely manner.
- This, in turn, will help reduce incidents of complaints and malpractices.
- There is a provision to debar offenders for three years to bring in more electoral discipline.
About Multi State Cooperative Societies
- India, at present, has nearly 800,000 cooperative societies of which around 1,600 are MSCS.
- They serve the interest of members in more than one state. These include some big names like IFFCO, Kribhco and Nafed.
- Of the 1600- odd MSCS, the majority are in Maharashtra (570), followed by UP (150) and New Delhi (133).
- Credit cooperatives constitute the bulk of the MSCS (610), followed by agriculture-oriented MSCS (244).
- There are around 100 multi-state cooperative diaries and 70 multi-state cooperative banks.
