Cooperatives

Cooperatives

A broad range of leaders from India’s national movement, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Socialists, and Communists, all believed that co-operativization would significantly improve agriculture, particularly benefiting the poor.

In 1949, the Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee, or Kumarappa Committee, recommended that the state be empowered to enforce varying degrees of cooperation for different types of farming.

The First Plan took a balanced approach, recommending support for small and medium farms to form cooperative farming societies. It was expected that village panchayats, motivated party workers, and trained staff from the Community Development programme, launched in 1952, would aid this effort.

The Second Plan was more optimistic, stressing the importance of laying the groundwork for cooperative farming and aimed to bring a significant portion of agricultural land into cooperative farming over ten years.

In 1959, the Congress party passed the Nagpur Resolution, envisioning a future agrarian system based on joint cooperative farming, to be achieved within three years.

However, leaders like C. Rajagopalachari, N.G. Ranga, and Charan Singh opposed this move. In response, Prime Minister Nehru assured Parliament in February 1959 that no coercion would be used to introduce cooperatives.

The promotion of cooperative farming, often citing China’s success with corporatization, lost favor after Chinese aggression in Tibet in 1959 and subsequent border encroachments, making the Chinese model seem suspect.

As a result, the Congress shifted its focus toward promoting service cooperatives nationwide.

The Third Plan reflected this shift, proposing a more modest approach with a target of ten pilot cooperative farming projects per district. It also emphasized integrating cooperative farming with broader agricultural efforts, including credit, marketing, distribution, and processing through the community development movement