Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation addressed the ‘Sahkar se Samriddhi’ (Prosperity through Cooperation) program organized on the occasion of 102nd International Day of Cooperatives on 6 July in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.
This year on July 6, cooperatives around the world celebrated the International Day of Cooperatives with the theme “Cooperatives Building a Better Future for All”.
Key points
The International Day of Cooperatives is celebrated on the first Saturday of July each year. While it was first celebrated under the auspices of the United Nations in 2005, its origins date back to 1923 when it was first observed by the international cooperative movement and the International Co-operative Alliance.
The earliest record of a co-operative comes from Scotland in March 14 1761. In 1844 a group of 28 artisans working in the cotton mills in north of England established the first modern co-operative business.
More than 12% of humanity is part of any of the 3 million cooperatives on earth.
The central government has formed three multi-state cooperative institutions – Organic Committee, Export Committee and Seed Committee.
Even today there are 2 lakh panchayats in the country where there is not a single cooperative institution. The Government has set a target that in the next 5 years we will work to create multipurpose PACS in these two lakh panchayats.
The Union government has also made model bylaws for PACS and despite PACS being a state subject, every state from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Assam to Dwarka has accepted these model bylaws.
