NEW DELHI: Union Minister of Home Affairs and Cooperation Amit Shah said on Wednesday that each panchayat in the country will have a primary agricultural cooperative society (PACS).
“Currently, PACS are involved in booking railway tickets, and the Ministry of Cooperation is working to enable PACS to sell airline tickets as well,” he said while presiding over the first meeting of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee of the Ministry of Cooperation on ‘Initiatives to Strengthen Cooperative Societies’.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi once remarked that “people wearing ‘hawai chappals’ would travel by flight”, and moving towards this vision, the NDA government is working to ensure that air tickets are accessible even in the remotest corners of the country’s every panchayat.
Shah stressed that enterprises associated with India’s cooperative sector would now compete with corporate entities, fulfilling the PM’s vision of ‘Sahkar Se Samriddhi’ (prosperity through cooperation). “The government is committed to ensuring the cooperative sector enjoys the same opportunities as the corporate sector,” he said.
“The Ministry of Cooperation, in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance, the Reserve Bank of India, and the Income Tax Department, has taken steps to create a unified tax structure for both corporate and cooperative sectors,” he added.
He noted that the government’s first task after the creation of the Ministry of Cooperation was to compile a database of PACS in partnership with state governments, with the aim of establishing 2 lakh PACS in the next five years. “Now, the work to develop the national cooperative database is nearly complete, and information on cooperative societies across the country is available at the click of a button,” he said.
PACS are currently linked to over 20 different activities and functioning as Common Service Centres, Jan Aushadhi Kendras, and offering other services within panchayats.
According to the data on the National Cooperative Database portal, the country has 1,01,524 functional PACS. Maharashtra leads with the highest number of PACS at 21,060, followed by Gujarat with 10,193, Bihar with 8,484, Rajasthan with 8,187, Uttar Pradesh with 7,178, and Karnataka with 6,001.
Highlighting the importance of trained manpower in the cooperation sector, Shah said his ministry has introduced a bill for the establishment of the Tribhuvan Sahkari University and “it will be passed by Parliament soon.”